Wednesday, July 11, 2007

What next for Sidestep?

Tim Hughes on the The BOOT blog has been musing over the long term strategy for Sidestep.

He reckons it is probably too early for a sale of the business per se, but he raises some interesting points/speculates wildly mainly in the area of whether Sidestep would consider a "technology buy".

Hmmm.

Anyway, Sidestep has its fingers in many pies - content deals, white labelling with Orange, blogging/reviews, as well as travel search, of course - and is rolling out international versions reasonably frequently.

The question remains: what is the end game for a meta search site?

TravelSupermarket (and Cheapflights soon, perhaps?) is going one way and will - if all goes to plan - list on the London Stock Exchange later this month.

It is an enormously complicated sector, and no-one really knows where the future lies for the likes of Sidestep, Kayak et al.

...except our hugely opinionated audience, of course: so write your What Nexts in the comments section.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

interesting question, kevin.

it seems that metasearch engines like sidestep, kayak, skyscanner and the rest have a limited shelf life.

they can only grow so much before selling or IPOing.

the problem with listing on a stock market is that shareholders will want growth and how does a metsearch engine REALLY grow?

something will happen to one of these guys in the next few years - then we will see...

Anonymous said...

I still think that *most* people go to Orbitz/Travelocity and those sites have the name recognition.

It's hard for FareCompare/Kayak/SideStep to gain market share.