Leonardo Media: Overview

Travel Web sites face a daunting task: delivering comprehensive, timely, and accurate information that runs the gamut from hotel pricing and local destination information to flight schedules and cruise line timetables. Gathering, checking, and publishing this broad range of information is a huge undertaking that requires organizations to collate and update massive amounts of visual and textual material.

The challenge isn't limited to tour operators and travel Web site companies. The various information providers themselves must struggle with sending separate copies of photographs, graphical images and textual information to multiple distribution channels. Repetitive tasks and possibility for error make this a costly process.

Enter Leonardo Media (www.Leonardo.com), which provides a simple, cost-effective answer to both problems by acting as a single source for a wide spectrum of travel information in the form of pictures, text, logos, maps and video.

The company got its start in 1995, when Itzhak Baram was president of Odysseus Multimedia Travel Information Channels. Baram had set up Odysseus to produce CD-ROMs with multimedia presentations of travel-related services. The problem he faced then was the same troubling travel information servicesdealing with a huge number of sources to find travel materials such as pictures, logos, videos and text.

Baram formed Leonardo Media a year later in 1996, with the aim of consolidating this tangle of travel data into a single, easily accessed source. Leonardo Media would act as a conduit for the constant and diverse flow of materials between services providers such as hotels, tourist boards and attractions to their distribution channels such as tour operators, travel Internet sites and publishers.