SideStepping Into Amazon

Attention, online travel booking specialists: Make room for Motley Fool Stock Advisor recommendation Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) on the crowded tarmac. The leading Internet retailer has teamed up with SideStep to launch a new travel store on the Amazon site. And this one will be a little different -- it will let prospective travelers compare several different portals.

That's the way SideStep itself operates -- it scours the various portals and direct online sites to deliver a cross-section of available rates. It's similar in its approach to the metasearch engines like Metacrawler and Mamma.com (Nasdaq: MAMA), which hit the standalone search engines and compile the findings to deliver the most popular results.

Online travel has changed over the years. For a while, supremacy was basically the battle between Sabre's (NYSE: TSG) Travelocity and Expedia (Nasdaq: EXPE). Then came Hotwire, Cendant's (NYSE: CD) Orbitz and Stock Advisor pick Priceline.com (Nasdaq: PCLN).

What became the battle of traditional travel agents losing ground to the online behemoths then evolved into a more cutthroat market. Many of the portals were left with little choice but to tack on fees, which in most cases can be avoided by booking directly with the provider. SideStep is so powerful because it can scour all of the online agents and pick out only the best deals.

Amazon isn't the first online retailer to offer travel bookings. Overstock.com (Nasdaq: OSTK), one of the original Rule Breakers newsletter selections, has been selling travel on its site for a few years; it even acquired a ski vacation specialist last year. Even if this may never become more than a second-tier offering for Amazon, it's a sound move. It allows Amazon to keep up with the competition.

The Internet moves pretty fast. Amazon wouldn't want to wake up one day to find that the flight had left without it.

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Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz still relies on the portals to get basic travel information, but then he runs off to see whether he can get a better deal directly through the provider. He does not own shares in any of the companies in this story. The Fool has a disclosure policy. He is also part of the Rule Breakers newsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early.