Amazon.com visitors will, early next year, be able to use SideStep's travel search engine to search more than 100 sites for airline travel, car rental and hotel deals from the likes of JetBlue, Hyatt, Thrifty Car Rental and American Airlines as well as online travel agencies and consolidators, reports DM News. Amazon now partners with Hotwire.com and The Vacation Store to offer travel deals to consumers.
The agreement would give SideStep's travel and hospitality advertisers a distribution boost, writes ClickZ. SideStep partners pay the company on a cost-per-acquisition basis and offers advertising opportunities on its engine and in email newsletters.
Whether SideStep is paying Amazon for the exposure or whether the two have a revenue-sharing arrangement is not clear, with neither disclosing the financial details or duration of the deal.
Market researcher PhoCusWright projects that U.S. online leisure and unmanaged business travel bookings will grow from $65 billion this year to $94 billion in 2007. It also forecasts that 42 percent of all U.S. travel purchases will be made online this year, with the proportion increasing to 55 percent in 2007.
