Skinkers, communication you can't miss

The Source is designed to excite travellers about their next planned holiday destination. STA Travel trawl the web and their own traveller's feedback for the best of bars, clubs, places to eat, 5* travel blogs, cool local homemade videos, podcasts and relevant STA Travel flights, hotels and tours.

After filtering the most entertaining or useful content, The Source pushes information, once a day to the user through desktop notifications developed by Skinkers.

STA Travel are also using Skinkers technology to keep in touch with students and young people locally, creating The Source feeds for 10 UK cities.

The Source is easy to install, completely free of charge and compatible with most Windows operating systems. There are no subscription fees, users can choose multiple destinations and it's easy for them to add their own preferred news feeds (RSS) to the application.

STA Travel and Skinkers are launching in 7 countries, 10 international cities and 10 UK cities. Users can change their feeds as often as they change their holiday plans.

Skinkers Desktop Notifications make it straightforward to receive, review and shortlist relevant information from a variety of sources around the web, from partners like Lonely Planet and Itchy Guides, from STA Travel product feeds and user generated content.

The Source also allows STA Travel to communicate relevant, integrated and timely products to their customers. A user who signs up to hear about New York is more receptive to a user review of a great hostel or a 1 day sale on a New York flight. The Skinkers technology allows these product messages to be sent quickly, cost effectively and more importantly in a way that can't be missed.

Sarah McDonald, Online Marketing Manager at STA Travel said the introduction of the Source is an essential step in developing the STA Travel community, aligns the brand with the freshest user generated content and is an innovative approach to destination based CRM: "The Source is pushing content which is rich enough and cool enough for the user to enjoy being notified once a day. We review all the web has to offer and draw attention to the gems. Our customers also have a lot to say, with Skinkers we've harnessed and shared this content with other travellers."

Matteo Berlucchi, CEO at Skinkers commented: "There is a lot of information people who are about to travel would like to made aware of before they set off. Timeliness and visibility are two important factors. Our technology has been designed specifically to help people receiving the information they should know about directly to the screen of their computers in a way that can't be missed."

How to Install The Source:

• Go to www.statravel.co.uk

• Click Download The Source

• Follow the instructions to install the application to your computer

With The Source installed, users can add RSS feeds from other favourite sources, each user has customised, personal news and content on their desktop.

About STA Travel
STA Travel are the student and youth travel experts (and have been for over 25 years). We send over 500,000 young people overseas every year and offer a huge variety of travel products negotiated for our market and often unique to us. We have 60 branches throughout the UK, a call centre and can be found online at www.statravel.co.uk. We now have over 650,000 subscribers to our weekly online newsletter and over 700,000 unique visitors to the site each month. In 2006 we achieved "CoolBrandLeader" status for the third year running.

Media contact at STA Travel:
Carolyn Doggett
Tel: +44 (0) 207 361 6327
Email: carolyn.doggett@statravel.co.uk