Client: TravelocityIndustry: Online Travel
Website: www.travelocity.com
About Travelocity
With a comprehensive array of online booking services, Travelocity is among the world's best-known online travel brands with over $10 billion USD in bookings annually. Currently available in 22 countries and six languages, Travelocity is rapidly expanding into the global marketplace with a focus on competitive pricing, local content and secure online transactions. Travelocity is owned by Sabre Holdings, a global leader in travel marketing and distribution.
"Andovar offered more competitive pricing and a larger mix of translation options, including machine translation and post-editing, than other vendors."
Travelocity’s
Localization Needs
In 2010 allhotels.com, Travelocity's new hotel-booking site, launched in English. The goal was to have the site initially localized into five languages before the end of 2010, with 15+ languages planned for the future. However, the size and nature of the content along with other technical requirements meant that Travelocity had to find a localization partner to help them overcome the following challenges:
High volumes of content into multiple languages: The AllHotels site contains millions of words of content, covering topics including hotel descriptions and city/destination guides. However, the budget and project time frame would not allow for all of this content to be processed by human translators. Travelocity needed to explore other solutions to get this content localized.
Content creation needed before localization could start: Travelocity needed to find a content creation partner to write some of the content in English with an eye toward future localization. This content consisted mainly of travel guide and destination highlight articles, ranging in size from 250 to 400 words per articles. Though the topics of the content did not pose a challenge, the volumes and time lines did – about half a million words of content would be needed within a short time frame of just weeks. That same content would then have to be localized.
Search engine optimization(SEO) and multi-lingual eMarketing needs: Travelocity had an extensive amount of SEO and marketing content that needed to be adapted for the localized versions of the site. They needed a partner that could first provide specialized SEO research for the target languages, and then implement that research into the localization of the marketing content.
A dedicated team to manage the many aspects of the L10N effort: Given the high volumes, tight turnarounds and varied services needed to successfully launch the localized site, Travelocity needed a partner that could provide a team of dedicated personnel available around the clock to manage this effort. Having a single vendor to provide a range of services was also highly desirable.
The
Andovar Solution
After
considering a wide range of localization companies, Travelocity chose Andovar as its
service provider, both for localization and eMarketing needs. Here are ways
that Andovar was able to rise to the challenge and provide high quality
services to Travelocity:
Saving Time & Money with Machine Translation + Post-Editing: Though a certain amount of core site content was pegged for localization through the standard human translation process, Travelocity still had millions of words of hotel descriptions and articles that needed to be localized in a more budget-friendly manner. Andovar was able to provide options for machine translation through collaboration with our technology partner, AsiaOnline. The translation engines were first customized for the type of content needed by Travelocity to ensure higher translation quality. The engines were then able to rapidly translate millions of words of content at a fraction of the cost of human translation. For some of the machine-translated content, Andovar also provided high volume post-editing services, executed by early-career linguists at very low costs. This enabled Travelocity to get an even higher level of accuracy and quality while still drastically reducing translation costs. Given that the translation engines can process hundreds of thousands of words in just a few hours, the time savings for Travelocity were also enormous.
Content Writing Services: Andovar frequently provides content writing services to its clients, particularly those in the travel industry. We work with dozens of dedicated writing professionals to provide top-quality content that is also often SEO optimized. Our in-house editors carefully monitor the writers' output to eliminate errors and check for plagiarism to ensure Andovar-generated content is 100% original. Our off-shore production offices allow us to keep costs down – a savings which in turn benefits our clients. The Andovar writing team created well over 1,000 articles written according to specific needs and guidelines from Travelocity. These articles were later localized into multiple languages.
Globalized SEO and eMarketing Services: Andovar's content creation services typically revolve around providing SEO articles written in English. To further this, we also provide globalized SEO and eMarketing services to adapt marketing content for other languages and regions. In order to adapt the many SEO articles written for AllHotels, our eMarketing team researched SEO data for the target languages, and then applied that research when localizing the content. The end result meant the translated articles were also SEO-optimized for specific languages and regions.
Smartly Integrated Services: By choosing to work with Andovar, the AllHotels team is able to get a wide range of services from a single provider. Content creation, global SEO optimization, multilingual localization, and machine translation are all handled and managed by Andovar. Additionally, the locations of our production offices in Asia and South America mean that we are able to provide round-the-clock service to AllHotels.
In 2010, Travelocity successfully launched allhotels.com in Latin American Spanish, Polish, Brazilian
Portuguese, French and German. Andovar continues to work with other divisions of Sabre on
localization into additional languages while continually providing content
creation and globalized SEO services.
