December 13, 2004

Travel Aggregators Taking Share

The biggest news in online travel has been the arrival of "travel aggregator" sites like Sidestep, Cheapflights, Qixo, Kayak, and Farechase. These sites crawl the net in search of the best deals and get referral fees for pointing users to the online travel companies. Sidestep even searches the inventory of JetBlue and Southwest, which hasn't been done before. Qixo even charges consumers a fee for their service. The big boys are starting to notice as Yahoo bought Farechase in July and AOL took a minority stake in Kayak.