Dallas-based Pegasus Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: PEGS) today announced that Lowestfare.com is tapping Pegasus for private label, real-time online hotel booking capabilities. Las Vegas-based Lowestfare.com is scheduled to implement Pegasus’ online booking engine in late April 2000. Pegasus Systems is a leading provider of hotel industry transaction processing solutions and electronic commerce services and operates its own consumer Internet travel reservations site: TravelWeb.com® (http://www.travelweb.com).

Lowestfare.com (http://lowestfare.com) offers travelers discounts and value-added options in airline ticketing, car and hotel reservations, cruises and tour programs. By using Pegasus’ Private Label Reservations Service, Lowestfare.com will be able to provide its users with real-time online hotel reservation capabilities along with detailed property information and photos.

Through Pegasus, Lowestfare.com will gain direct access to the central reservations systems of more than 32,000 hotels, enabling it to display real-time room availability and rate information. The flexibility of the Pegasus Private Label Reservation Service allows Lowestfare.com to display special, exclusive discounted rates that it has negotiated with any of the hotels in the Pegasus online distribution database.

Ken Swanton, chief executive officer of Lowestfare.com said, “Pegasus complements our existing travel reservation capabilities by providing access to a significant hotel room inventory along with advanced booking features such as detailed search criteria, maps of hotel locations and instant confirmations and online cancellations.”

“We are pleased to add yet another travel Web site to our growing online distribution network,” said Pegasus Systems’ President and Chief Executive Officer John F. Davis III. “This agreement is a boon for our hotel clients. Soon, the 32,000 hotels in our database will be instantly available for booking on Lowestfare.com without ever having to establish their own reservations connections to Lowestfare.com. And, the hotels don’t have to worry about manually updating rates and information on the site. As a customer of Pegasus, our hotel clients get global Internet exposure, and instantaneously, sites like Lowestfare.com get reservations access to tens of thousands of hotels around the world.”

With direct connections via the Pegasus Electronic Distribution system to hotels’ central reservations systems, Pegasus’ Private Label Reservation Service provides Lowestfare.com similar hotel reservation and confirmation capabilities available through Pegasus’ consumer retail site, TravelWeb.com (http://www.travelweb.com). By using Pegasus’ Private Label Reservation Service, Lowestfare.com can give consumers the ability to efficiently shop, compare room rates and query room availability at hotels in 180 countries, as well as view hotel property photos, securely make reservations online and receive a confirmation in seconds.

More than 85 Web sites have contracted with Pegasus to have their hotel reservations “Powered by Pegasus?, including Expedia.com (http://www.expedia.com) (Nasdaq: EXPE), Hotel Reservations Network (http://www.hoteldiscounts.com) (Nasdaq: ROOM), the Denver Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau (http://www.denver.org) and Japan’s Recruit Isize Travel (http://www.isize.com). During 1999, Pegasus processed Internet hotel bookings representing an estimated $500 million in room revenues.

According to estimates by research firm Jupiter Communications, online travel bookings will grow to $16.6 billion by 2003, with hotel reservations commanding almost 25 percent of all bookings. According to Forrester Research, sales in the travel industry have become the largest online retail category, with estimated online transactions of $7.8 billion in 1999, growing to $32 billion in 2004.

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