12 October 2004

Multimap’s Maps and Multi-Lingual Travel Directions Launch on Opodo

Multimap, Europe’s leading online mapping company, today announced the deployment of its “Storefinder”, “Travel Directions” and “Portal” services on www.opodo.co.uk, www.opodo.fr, and www.opodo.de. The online mapping services will enable travellers researching hotels on Opodo’s online travel service to choose a hotel based on its exact location, what’s located around it, and how easy it is to get to from the nearest airport.

Visitors to www.opodo.co.uk, www.opodo.fr, and www.opodo.de click on the “Hotel” tab; enter the city, island or region of interest; and Multimap delivers a list of hotels in the location specified. Each entry shows the hotel name, address, a brief description of the site, its distance from the city centre and the nearest airport, and the price per person, per night. Users can click on a scalable, overview map of the area showing the location of the top eight nearest hotels as icons by clicking on the “View Map” tab at the top of this page. They can click on the “Full Hotel Details” link for their hotel of interest to access a scalable, detailed map of the location of the hotel, plus other location information such as nearby facilities, e.g., museums/galleries, beach and shops; hotel amenities; room facilities; and hotel policies.

To access point-to-point travel directions to the hotel from the nearest airport, users click on the “Travel Directions” link, select a language (English, French or German), and Multimap delivers an overview map plotting the route plus a list of step-by-step directions. Detailed maps of each step of the journey are only a click away, as are directions for the return journey. Cumulative time and distance are also shown.

Multimap’s “Portal” service provides Opodo customers with detailed, worldwide maps. They simply click on the “Maps” link on the home page, and select the area of interest by either entering a city/town and country, or clicking on a map. They can then zoom in/out or pan N,S,E,W to adjust their view.

Neil Mott, UK Country Manager for Opodo. said, “It’s vitally important for us to offer our customers not only the best deals, but also the most accurate and helpful information about the travel and hospitality options available to them. Multimap has excellent mapping coverage worldwide and this, coupled with a robust infrastructure that can deal with surges in traffic volume during peak season, made Multimap our obvious mapping partner of choice. The maps and travel directions delivered are accurate, and easy-to-read and follow, and are delivered at sub-second speed, all of which helps to increase consumers’ confidence in making a booking online.”

Jeff Kelisky, CEO of Multimap, commented, “Providing location-based information is an immense help when it comes to choosing a hotel and making a reservation, as this information is key to most people’s decisions about their holiday destinations. More people have the confidence to make a booking once they can visualise a hotel’s location and map their route to it from the airport. We are delighted to be working with Opodo, helping them to deliver user-friendly, relevant and accurate information for all their customers.”

About Multimap

Multimap is Europe's leading provider of mapping and location-based services. The company delivers more online maps, point-to-point driving directions and geo-spatial ("where's my nearest?") searches to more companies than any other supplier in Europe. All services are offered on mobile, PDA, kiosk, and interactive TV platforms and in multiple languages.

The public website, www.multimap.com, provides a range of free, useful services to assist with everyday life. Key features include street-level maps of Europe, USA, Canada and Australia; road maps of the world; door-to-door travel directions; aerial photographs; weather forecasts; links to location information; and services such as hotel, restaurant and entertainment booking. The public site attracts over 7.3 million unique users, registers more than 140 million page impressions every month, and is one of the top 10 most visited websites in the UK. Multimap recently featured in The Sunday Times Tech Track 100 league table of fastest-growing, unquoted technology companies for the second consecutive year.

About Opodo

Opodo addresses the real needs of today's traveller by offering an unbiased and competitively priced online travel service for world travel, with access to flights from over 400 airlines, 34,000 hotel properties and over 7,000 car hire locations worldwide, as well as travel insurance.

Opodo launched its first site (www.opodo.de) in Germany in November 2001, its UK site (www.opodo.co.uk) in January and its French site (www.opodo.fr) in April 2002 Opodo is owned by travel technology company Amadeus and by nine of Europe's leading airlines - Aer Lingus, Air France, Alitalia, Austrian Airlines, British Airways, Finnair, Iberia, KLM and Lufthansa.

For more information please go to www.opodo.com