SideStep Tackles Local Activity Search Head-On
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Written By Reprise Media | April 27, 2006 | Share This
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SideStep, a vertical travel engine that aggreagates prices for flights, hotels and rental cars, has added a local activity search in beta. Searching multiple sites for entertainment and dining options like museums, tours, and sporting events, SideStep becomes (in the words of their press release, anyway) “an enhanced one-stop travel shop to secure all facets of their itinerary.”
It does look pretty cool, actually. Input a city and a range of dates, and SideStep returns nearby activities and events that can be further narrowed down by price, category, duration, day, and city (since a search for New York, for instance, returns results from Corona and The Bronx, which might not be of interest to travelers ensconced in a Midtown hotel).
Brian Smith at VerticalSearch.net (we got there from his Search Engine Watch blurb) has an expansive run down, matching the fledgling SideStep product against those of established online travel heavies for locations like Honolulu, New York, and Perth, Australia. He calls Expedia’s activty search “paltry” and found Travelocity’s results lacking (he even surmised they were artificially pared down) compared with SideStep’s “comprehensive” listings.
Not that there aren’t quibbles. Smith found that some prices appeared different on the results page than they did on activities’ detail pages, for instance. And the beta service is hardly (and understandably) comprehensive for many locales - we did a “Washington, DC” search for this upcoming weekend, and only saw events listed for two Maryland cities, Annapolis and Baltimore, which are respectively 32 and 44 miles away from our nation’s capital - home of the Kennedy Center, the National Theater, and the Smithsonian, to name a few. But the functionality is there now, even if the listings aren’t quite up to speed yet.
Topics: Search: Vertical |