SideStep has signed an agreement with Amazon Services, an Amazon.com company, that will help Amazon's customers find and discover the best travel values on the Web.

Published: 10 Nov 2005

SideStep has signed an agreement with Amazon Services, an Amazon.com company, that will help Amazon's customers find and discover the best travel values on the Web.

SideStep will provide its acclaimed travel search engine to www.amazon.com's travel store customers beginning in early 2006.

SideStep will be partnering with Amazon Services to promote SideStep's travel search engine to Amazon.com customers in its travel store, said Jeff Blackburn, Amazon.com's vice president Business Development.

"Starting in early 2006, our customers will be able to find and discover the best deals on airline, hotel, and rental car offerings using this unique approach to travel search," said Blackburn.

"With millions of customer accounts, Amazon is one of the world's largest and most influential ecommerce companies, and this partnership reaffirms SideStep's leadership in travel search," said Russ Lemelin, SideStep's Interim chief executive officer. "Amazon's mission is to help its customers to find anything they might want to buy - at the best price. Our approach to online travel is well-aligned with Amazon's consumer-centric world view, and we're excited to introduce the benefits of the travel search model to Amazon's huge audience of active online shoppers."

As per the information available, Sidestep will replace Hotwire.com as the travel search engine at Amazon's travel store.

"Interestingly, this move comes just days after Google announced that they are testing a similar travel packages search engine to enable user hunt for cheapest fares on the internet. Amazon seems to be worried that people would move to Google for searching for such travel packages if they could not offer them a specialized and improved solution. It would be interesting to see how market reacts to the new proposed search engine service from Google, which puts it against a lot of high profile internet players," said a media report.