Travel search company SideStep partnered with charitable U.K search engine everyclick.com to enhance its newly released travel search offering.
At the end of March, everyclick reported more than 900,000 travel-related searches had been done through the two-week old service. The engine, which donates 50 percent of its gross revenue to charities selected by users, is sponsored by HP productions, Art of Wax, Numark Ltd., Haymarket, David Graham Photography, and St Lawrence School, in addition to many others on its travel deal offering. The partnership with Sidestep is an attempt to deliver the most accurate information in the shortest amount of time and effort from the user.
“One of the key strategies of SideStep is to provide the unbiased travel search services to portals and other web sites,” said Kevin Eyres, managing director at SideStep Europe. “The SideStep product is an incredibly powerful tool for users to compare the Web for travel, which meets their needs at the best value.
The deal incorporates SideStep’s travel search technology into everyclick’s existing search engine functionality, allowing consumers to compare travel deals while simultaneously raising money for charity.
The tool provides a close integration and co-branding to reflect the everyclick’s look and feel.
SideStep’s real-time, dynamic technology allows everyclick customers to compare and contrast flight, hotel and car insurance deals between OpenTravel Alliance (OTA) sites. The OTA is a trade organization that works towards the open sharing of travel industry information via XML on the Internet. SideStep gives users access to more than 600 airlines, 150,000 hotels and 30,000 car rental sites worldwide.
While other meta search companies work with OTA sites, SideStep is unique in Europe because it works with both Ebookers and Opodo where most others only work with one such site, according to Mr. Eyres.
In addition to offering its price comparison services at www.sidestep.com, the company also powers travel search services for Orange customers at orange.co.uk and Forbes’ new luxury travel website, ForbesTraveler.com.
“The portals and Web sites are offering their customers easy, quick and relevant information, which enhances the user experience while driving additional revenue to the portal and Web site,” he said. “The benefit to SideStep is greater traffic to our service and supply partners, more awareness of SideStep and travel search.”
