SideStep

» see sidestep.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

sidestep never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it ran as a US travel meta-search product through the years before turkish travelers had english-language flight aggregators built into their habits. by 2006-2007 when it peaked, the dominant booking flow in turkey ran through national carriers and the local agencies, not through aggregator engines indexing US airlines.

the company launched in 1999 in california as a browser plugin. you installed it into internet explorer and it scraped airline and hotel sites from the client side when you visited them. brian barth founded it. the model evolved into a comparison portal at sidestep.com, where you typed a route and the site queried partner inventory in parallel. the toolbar lineage stuck around for years after the website was the main product.

through the early 2000s sidestep raised the early-stage rounds typical of a vertical-search startup. by 2006 rob solomon, an ex-yahoo commerce executive, was running it as ceo after a board push. revenue went from about $14 million to $35 million over his two years and the company turned profitable, which is what made it attractive to kayak.

~ the record ~

~ the kayak years ~

kayak announced the acquisition on 20 december '07. the deal was structured at around $180 million in cash, with another $20 million in sidestep's own cash distributed to shareholders. kayak had just raised $196 million from investors to finance the buy. at the time of the deal kayak and sidestep were the two largest travel meta-search engines on the english-speaking web.

the post-deal plan was to run both brands. sidestep kept its santa clara office and its own staff. kayak's logic was that the two sites had slightly different user bases and the consolidation could happen later. through 2008 and 2009 the two domains kept their own homepages and their own sort algorithms. marketing budgets stayed split for the same window.

by 2010 it was clear the strategy was not going to hold. less than ten percent of kayak's company-wide traffic was coming through sidestep.com by the end of the year. the second brand was paying its own engineering and sales overhead for a shrinking share.

~ the redirect ~

in january '11 kayak switched sidestep.com to a redirect pointing at kayak.com. the santa clara office was closed. the staff who had kept the brand alive for three post-acquisition years moved over to kayak or moved out of the company.

the domain still resolves to kayak in 2026, fifteen years after the redirect went up. you can type sidestep.com into a browser and land on a kayak hotel search. for anyone who used the original product, the redirect is the whole grave.

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