Opodo, the new online travel company created by nine of Europe?fs leading airlines (Aer Lingus, Air France, Alitalia, Austrian Airlines, British Airways, Finnair, Iberia, KLM and Lufthansa) has made its UK debut, selling flights and providing a choice of hotel rooms, car hire locations and travel insurance.
Other features include images, airport guides and location maps. All of Opodo?fs language sites feature travel information sourced and integrated by eSubstance, Europe?fs leading provider of online content and knowledge management solutions. The opodo.co.uk launch follows the success of opodo.de in Germany, and precedes opodo.fr, which will launch in the second quarter of 2002.

The English language content selected by Opodo includes 10,000 hand picked tourist attractions that have been taken from a range of sources and re-purposed and optimised for the web by eSubstance and Opodo. eSubstance is delivering a complete multi-language content solution, managing the entire process of rights acquisition, digitisation, XML tagging and delivery in preparation for client testing.

Giovanni Bisignani, CEO of Opodo said, ?gOpodo spent many months speaking with European travellers and is delivering a specially tailored site to put the customer in control, giving them the tools, the information and the inspiration to go where they want, when they want and how they want.?h

Jeffrey O?fRourke, Chief Executive of eSubstance, said that ?eOpodo will reach an incredible number of potential customers. The eSubstance solution will help to ensure that international customers have access to an unrivalled amount of local information, helping them to make the best travel choices in their particular circumstances.?f

www.opodo.com
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