Hotwire Announces Partnership with Coremetrics

7 July 2003

Hotwire.com has selected
Coremetrics, a leading provider of online marketing analytics
solutions, to provide intelligent analysis of online customer and visitor
behavior for the Hotwire Web site.

Hotwire will leverage detailed behavioral analysis
from Coremetrics Marketforce for Travel to determine the most effective means
of displaying travel deals to customers, as well as identify and eliminate
conversion bottlenecks.

“In 2001, $27 billion of travel was purchased online in the United States
alone and by the end of 2003, it is projected that over 70 billion US dollars
will be spent online for travel worldwide,” said Scott Kauffman, chairman of
Coremetrics. “Today`s highly competitive environment demands that travel
service providers understand how to identify and improve the value of existing
customers. Coremetrics Marketforce for Travel provides Web site analysis
designed specifically for the travel vertical, and Hotwire is a prime example
of the type of high volume, rapidly growing Web site that can benefit greatly
from advanced analysis of online channel interactions.”

Specifically created to serve the needs of online travel service
providers, Coremetrics Marketforce for Travel provides detailed information
about the activity of visitors and customers on Hotwire.com in the form of
LIVE (Lifetime Individual Visitor Experience) Profiles useful for increasing
marketing effectiveness, improving site design, and optimizing travel package
promotions. The foundation of Marketforce for Travel is the Core Data
Platform(TM), a hosted dynamic data warehouse containing the most complete and
accurate online customer and visitor information available in the market.
Through a patent-pending browser-based data collection technology, the Core
Data Platform anonymously gathers and stores behavioral information directly
from the visitor`s browser and records interactions in real-time to build LIVE
Profiles that are the source of all Coremetrics reporting and analysis.
Coremetrics Marketforce for Travel is a managed solution that requires no new
hardware or software and is deployed within days.

“We had two key objectives in implementing Coremetrics Marketforce,” said
Alisa Weiner, vice president of consumer experience at Hotwire. “First, we
wanted to identify precisely where customers were departing from our site, and
eliminate the drop-off points in order to improve overall conversion ratios.
Secondly, we plan to leverage analysis from Coremetrics to help us merchandise
more effectively. We want to ensure that our travel deals are displayed in an
optimal manner for our customers, as well as identify which deals are the most
popular and which travel services should be bundled and sold together.”