One of the first decisions we ever made when building HW was that we’d deeplink as much as possible, whether it be from a hotel or resort page, we’d link to the same hotel / resort page on the merchants site. It wasn’t a new concept by any means, but we knew it would increase the usefulness of the site, and our workload.

As I type, HW has 50,273 unique deeplinks to a total of 39 merchants websites; 47,316 are individual hotels and 3,137 are to resorts. It’s worth pointing out all link codes are added manually to each hotel / resort to ensure they are accurate and that they work. At this time of year we get the stock lists from most of the holiday companies for the following season, lots of fun sorting that out!

Our deeplinking policy has meant until recently we couldn’t / didn’t have any links to Thomas Cook for example as they had no actual landing pages for hotels or resorts. Thankfully they’re getting there and we should be linking their full stock sometime next year.

Anyway, having spent a fair chunk of time sorting all this out to make it as simple as possible, here’s how we do it.

Option 1 – Single Variable Deeplink

Taking AlphaRooms as an example, their URL looks like this –
http://www.alpharooms.com/hotel.aspx?404=true&id=77085fce-1643-4254-96a4-24b0089a738a
we know that for every hotel the first part of the URL is always going to be the same, so we store that in the database for that merchant. We also store the network link and an optional end link (where there is more link code after the unique identifier) in this way. For each hotel we store in the database the unique part of the URL , in this case 77085fce-1643-4254-96a4-24b0089a738a

Merchant: [Network Link] [Merchant Link Start] [Unique Id] [Merchant Link End]

Option 2 – Multi Variable or SEO Friendly Deeplinks

Taking Thomson as an example, their URL looks like this –
http://www.thomsonbeach.co.uk/th/beach/viewAccommodation.do?accommodationCode=000091&seasonCode=S2007&brochureCode=DTH01
There are at least 2 variables in the URL, so rather than database  “accommodationCode=000091&seasonCode=S2007&brochureCode=DTH01” for that hotel, we just create our own set of ids for the stock list. In our mapping the unique id for this hotel is “5”.

Merchant: [Network Link] [Use Unique Id To Pull Merchant link Whole]

OR

Virgin Holidays have lovely search engine friendly links –
http://www.virginholidays.co.uk/brochures/usa/holidays/las_vegas/las_vegas/circus_circus_hotel__casino/
Again we just use our own reference to create a mapping against their stock list as above.

Merchant: [Network Link] [Use Unique Id To Pull Merchant link Whole]

By breaking up your links this way it also makes it easier to chop and change networks, be it your own preference or the merchant decides to move.

While we store these mappings by database it’s just as simple to do it by CSV.

Below is a screenshot of our CMS for deeplinking on a hotel page.

We know our deeplinking works for us, as we often hear from our users telling us it’s easier to find a hotel on a merchant’s site by coming through HW than using the navigation on the merchant’s site!

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