SideStep alums launch Voyij, a search engine for travel deals

Everyone’s looking to save money when they travel, and the founders of a new site called Voyij say they’ve got one of the best ways to do that. What does Voyij offer? Lots and lots of deals pulled from sites around the web. With 15,000 to 20,000 deals on Voyij at any one time, co-founder and chief executive Brent Stewart says the site is orders of magnitude larger than the competition. Think of it as something similar to travel search engine Kayak , but focused on travel bargains.

The ideal Voyij user is a casual travel who’s focused on getting a good bargain and doesn’t have any concrete plans — the kind of person who thinks, “Hmm, I wonder if there’s a cheap way to get out of town this weekend …” Basically, you just enter whatever city your flying from, and a general timeframe for your departure: “This weekend,” “Next 2 Weeks,” “June,” etc. Then Voyij provides a list of flight, hotel, and package deals that it has pulled from the “deals” sections of other travel sites such as Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity. There are ways to narrow down the result, by destination for example, but obviously this approach is less useful for folks who are set on a specific destination or trip date — business travelers, for example.

The Kayak comparison has some weight to it, since Stewart also co-founded travel site SideStep, which was sold to Kayak for nearly $200 million in 2007, and Voyij’s two other co-founders also played key roles at SideStep. No one has brought Kayak and SideStep’s “meta search” approach (pulling listings from around the web into a single database) to travel deals, Stewart says. Instead, a site like TravelZoo is more of a deal publisher, which might mean the deals are higher quality, but also limits the selection.

Voyij has just taken the beta testing label off its site, and is making its first big push for attention. Stewart says he’s also talking to some venture capitalists about a possible first round of funding.

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • Miramon
    Wow, there are a lot of these travel-deal-scraping sites starting up these days. How many do we really need?
  • Dick Swithchick
    Apart from Voyij, I don't think I need any.