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
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...
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.