Lonely Planet Haystack Becomes Lonely Planet Hotels (& Hostels)

A continuation of this trend from today's news:

Excerpt:

OAKLAND, Calif. - Lonely Planet has long been synonymous with adventurous, no-frills young travelers, but the guidebook company's City Guides are growing up.

The revised series of books about places like San Francisco, Vancouver and Chicago is geared to Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers ages 30-60 who are interested in longer stays in cities, "affordable luxury" and cultural immersion, according to Lonely Planet spokesman Frank Ruiz. The guidebooks also offer more emphasis on shopping, entertainment and moderate to high-end restaurants and hotels than previous editions, with fewer listings for college hangouts, hostels and taco joints.

My understanding was that Haystack was buried a little while back.

This newly announced deal with HostelWorld and Expedia strikes me as what they should have done in the first place, instead of wasting millions trying to re-invent the wheel with Haystack.

Yes aboriginalhostel affiliates are the best marketeers for HW.

HW is doing an excellent job on the web. They try not to keep all the data for themselfs. They give away their booking engine to the world. It is something I learned in the past year. Your own website is not the key, it is where people can see, read and do things with what you have to offer.

Hostelbookers and Hostelsclub are trying the same tactics, other sites like hostelmania and Gomio should do the same, otherwise I think they have not a long weblive ahead.

Gomio has an affiliate programm, but not the availability off web services, so that the affiliate can present the data the way that the website owner want it. Or in my case for adding the propertys to the search engine I need a web service integration.
http://www.gomio.com/HostelServices/AffiliateIntegration.aspx

Hostelmania just got a big money injection from investors, and on this moment they are working on a web service integration and other affiliate options.