From Wendy Boswell,
Your Guide to Web Search.
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This article is an interesting "peek behind the curtain", so to speak, of what's going on in the travel search and travel search engine world from someone who should know - Phil Carpenter is Vice President, Corporate Marketing for SideStep and the author of eBrands.

Searching for Travel Packages Online - A Few Problems

Last time you searched for flights online, how many sites did you check before you finally bought your ticket? When made your purchase, how confident were you that you found the best deal?

If you’re like most people, you probably visited four to five sites before hitting the “buy” button. And I bet that even after you’d “done your homework,” you were still a bit slow on the draw with that credit card, uncertain whether you were truly making the right choice.

Shopping for travel has long seemed a mysterious process. That hotel room in Chicago that was available yesterday for $199 has jumped to $249 today. The rental car deals in Orlando that seemed plentiful last week have dried up just four days later, and there is not a rental car agency in town with the minivan you so desperately need.

Companies like Google and Yahoo have made it easy to find virtually anything you might want to buy online, from dog beds to copper cookware. So why the heck haven’t the technogoobers in search land figured out how to simplify your hunt for deal to Duluth?

Travel Search Problems

Good news: there are a handful of companies (including SideStep, the folks who help me pay my mortgage) laboring hard to fuse Web search with online travel. And if we figure this out, you’re not going to have to spend 45 minutes hopping from site to site next time you’re hunting for a Bakersfield hotel bargain.

So why is it so difficult to design a search engine for travel? How come the behemoths of search haven’t done this long ago? How does travel search stack up against the traditional online travel agencies?

Find out the answer on page two of this article about travel search engines.