DealBase — a good way to find a hotel deal

DealBase.com, a web site that crawls the Web to provide readers with the best hotel prices and package deals, is now giving you an even better way to refine searches by limiting results to, say, “five-star hotels” or accommodations with “spa credit.”

The company, based in San Mateo, Calif., today also announced a first round of funding: $1 million from angel investors including Russ Siegelman, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Bob Zipp, Managing Director of Amicus Capital and Josh Hannah, General Partner at Matrix Partners and former CEO of eHow.com.

The site’s new refined-search capability is something other sites already offer (indeed, another hotel ranking site Raveable.com, self-funded by former Microsoft employee Philip  Vaughn, emerged today that uses semantic analysis of reviews to recommend hotels). But DealBase.com may be at least as good as the rest of them on pricing. It launched just five months ago, and says its results are unbiased — that is, not affected by payments from hotels. It lets hotels post ads for free, and so DealBase is not influenced by advertising. And while other sites offer unbiased results for general travel (flights, hotels, etc), this company is exclusively focused on hotels.

The company says it had more than 100,000 unique visitors in March, 2009. It has 22,000 deals from over 3,500 sources. It has a “deal analyzer” software that compares advertised prices with regular prices and so is sure to select only deals that are discounts.

Chief executive Sam Shank’s previous company, hotel review site TravelPost.com, was acquired by SideStep and is now part of Kayak Corporation.

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