TraveLazer Betas Search Without Sales

by David Worthington

December 29, 2004, 7:04 PM

It is common knowledge that most online travel sites consistently battle it out over who can offer the best deals on hotels and airfare, but what happens when a user just wants to learn more about their destination?

Newcomer TravelLazer.com has publicly unveiled a beta test of its "objective" travel search engine that it claims will leverage a vertical filtering system to narrow down results -- verifying that Web sites are travel related -- as it spiders the Net for information limited to travel without returning results that sell services and travel packages.

"TraveLazer is just travel, only travel, nothing but travel," said TraveLazer founder and CEO of Mike DeVolder. "We are the only pure travel search engine out there. Sites like Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz are not travel search engines as they report, they are only large travel Web sites - that's all."

TravelLazer is a new addition to a budding crop of designer search engines that attempt to provide their users with relevant search results for niche markets. TravelLazer.com points out that horizontal search engines bring up Web pages devoted to the hotel heiress Paris Hilton when the words "Paris" and/or "Hilton" are entered into a query rather than providing useful travel information.

Other examples of designer search engines are AOL's Kayak travel site and SingingFish.com media search engine. Kayak is a subscriber-only travel search engine Kayak that scours over 60 online travel sites, providing prices and itineraries for more than 550 airlines and 85,000 hotels. SingingFish provides its users with rapid access to streaming media that they cannot find easily with traditional search engines.

Recent data from a Jupiter Research study suggests that spending in the search engine market will is likely to triple to triple to $5.5 billion by 2009, providing a financial incentive for businesses to offer additional products and services.

DeVolder commented on the report, saying, "Advertisers in this industry want to use the Internet to reach the 64 million U.S. consumers looking for travel services online, and the 42 million who spend more than $100 billion just on online travel bookings." Jupiter Research also reports that for each dollar generated online, travel companies recorded an additional $5 revenue from traditional channels as a direct result of research that consumers did online.

TravelLazer.com is currently undergoing beta testing.