Expedia Affiliate Network has announced a partnership with Webjet for the launch of the new hotel section of its growing travel booking website.

Webjet is the leading online travel agent in Australia and New Zealand, offering comparisons of flights, insurance and car hire prices to travellers.

The venture into hotel bookings complements its extensive travel offering and it now aims to become a leader in Asia Pacific for online hotel sales.

Webjet will use Expedia Affiliate Network’s API platform to access Expedia’s hotel inventory for domestic and international markets, providing access to almost 145,000 hotels worldwide under the Webjet brand.

Through EAN’s flexible, robust platform, Webjet will have access to EAN’s special offers and deals and its extensive customer-service infrastructure.

Before investing in the service, Webjet checked its new proposition would appeal to customers through an online experiment.

It created two websites: one was Webjet-branded and the other was not.

Both sites had the same inventory and prices.

It then directed traffic towards the sites and found that the Webjet branded service attracted double the number of visitors and those using this site made twice as many purchases with a higher value to those purchased on the alternative site.

“We now know consumers are comfortable with the proposition of transacting with Webjet Hotels,” explained Webjet managing director John Guscic.

“We see huge potential in this market and, combined with the compelling offer of inventory and prices from Expedia Affiliate Network, there’s a fantastic opportunity for us to become a leading player in the hotel bookings market within Asia Pacific and beyond.”

The roll out of the EAN platform will take place over the course of a few weeks, beginning with the Australian market.