Expedia Affiliate Network (EAN) has today announced the launch of EAN Smart Cross Sell, which enables airlines to maximize ancillary revenues by cross selling hotels to their online customers.

Most estimates put annual airline ancillary revenues to be in excess of $30 billion and the most active practitioners get nearly one-fifth of their operating revenues from such fees.

With Smart Cross Sell, airlines can display dynamic, tailored hotel offers to their customers during the online booking process, letting travellers add the perfect hotel to their airfare purchase. Smart Cross Sell also minimizes checkout disruption, resulting in less shopping cart abandonment and higher conversion.

“Smart Cross Sell presents bmi with a fantastic opportunity to deliver additional ancillary revenue to the business.  It allows our travellers to add the perfect hotel to their airfare purchase in just a few clicks,” says Stuart Beamish, Marketing Director of bmi, British Midland International. “Early results are positive as we’ve seen a 9% lift in hotel room nights and a 6% lift in incremental transactions by implementing EAN’s Smart Cross Sell product, and these uplift figures are significantly higher when comparing to the same period in 2010. It’s very encouraging to see that over 50% of our current growth in hotel sales has been as a direct result of this product launch.”

Smart Cross Sell combines Expedia’s intelligent sort algorithm, locating the highest converting properties and the best deals, with user-defined profiling to create a best in class hotel cross sell experience. It is based on EAN’s world leading private label technology platform, which has already helped over 10,000 online travel businesses shape the future of online travel.

“We’re excited to enhance the hotel shopping and booking experience for customers of our airline partners,” said Henrik Kjellberg, President of Expedia Affiliate Network. “As ancillary revenue becomes increasingly important to airlines, we wanted to deliver a relevant solution to our airline partners that converts – and our Smart Cross Sell fits the bill.”

EAN Smart Cross Sell is available immediately to EAN Airline Affiliates.