Travelaxe - Hotel Room Rates Aggregator - Passes 100-Country Mark

March 2005 - Travelaxe, Inc. of Austin, one of the world's fastest growing aggregators of hotel reservation information, has passed the century mark in the number of countries for which it provides detailed, comparative pricing on room costs.

"Travelaxe now serves business and leisure travelers with hotel information from 3,464 cities in 104 countries, from Albania to Zimbabwe," said Carl Samos, president and founder of the three-year-old firm. "By the end of 2005, we expect to surpass 4,000 cities and 120 countries and to serve more than 1 million consumers."

More than 250,000 users of the free system are already saving time and money by being able to search more than 20 different travel websites to obtain unbiased, side-by-side price comparisons, with the lowest price highlighted. Travelaxe can search all leading travel websites, as well as others including TripReservations.com, TravelWorm, TheReservationCompany, Travel-Center.com and HotelKingdom. Travelaxe is also now able to search direct hotel rates from InterContinental Hotels Group (Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, InterContinental, Crowne Plaza, Staybridge Suites, Candlewood Suites and Hotel Indigo) and several individual properties, with more coming available soon.

An hotelier version of the system with more travel websites and features is available for lodging executives to purchase and use for competitive analysis, revenue management and compliance reporting. Hoteliers who subscribe can search their specialized competitive criteria manually or with fully automated search functions for as little as 20 cents a room per month. Details on a free 10-day trial are available at: www.travelaxe.com/NewSite/Hoteliers_Overview.asp.

The Windows-based, hotel rates search system must be downloaded and installed on the user's PC. It takes the user directly to the travel website he/she chooses to complete a reservation. It even alerts the consumer to cities that may be clogged with large conventions and special events that may cause inconvenience.

"Travelers waste no time navigating to only one of many travel websites, which often show only some of the deals they have," explains Samos, an Internet pioneer with more than 17 years of professional software development and management experience. "With Travelaxe, the customers can select the best deals available from all these websites based on their own criteria and then make the reservation directly with the website that has the lowest rates."

Travelaxe is classified as an "aggregator" or "meta search engine," a growing class of search engines that scan the Web for bargains. Its system is secure and virus-free. It has no spyware, no adware and doesn't sell its e-mail lists. It makes commissions only from the travel websites, not the traveler.

Travelaxe Advantages, Features

• Quickest time for comparing hotel rates across a broad spectrum of websites with easy navigation.
• For help in narrowing choices, users can select from six search filters - distance, hotel, name (keywords), price, hotel rating and preferred websites.
• An Interactive Map & Distance Calculator to help travelers determine geographically where they want to stay in relation to specific map destinations.
• Averages the hotel class ratings from many of the websites as it searches, giving travelers a better overall idea of the class rating of a hotel.
• Provides useful and valuable resources for the location a traveler is searching, such as books, maps, newsletters, access to show bookings and more.
• An active forum for travelers to exchange information, pose questions or get technical support.

As a result of its many features and benefits, such websites as FreewarePro, Tucows and WebAttack have awarded Travelaxe its highest ratings. Download.com, EZ-Freebies.com, MyZips.com and ZDNet have reviewed Travelaxe and support it for downloads. The Lockergnome and TheFreeSite.com have reviewed Travelaxe and FreewareFiles has labeled it a "popular pick" download.

"Our primary goal is to become the leading international provider of unbiased, comparative hotel rates," Samos emphasizes.

"We want to be an extension of every traveler's hotel booking routine by delivering a superior comparison-to-reservation experience that saves the user both time and money while building guest satisfaction and retention for hotels worldwide," he stated.

Frustration Leads to Formation
Samos, 36, studied computer science for nine years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was the lead developer for the Computational Modeling Lab, a lab dedicated to creating applications such as iwgAIDS. This leading tool for modeling the AIDS pandemic worldwide was subsequently adopted by the U.S. Government. He then joined the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where he led the development of Mosaic, the famous World Wide Web browser. Microsoft, the most notable company to license Mosaic, utilized the software code to create Internet Explorer.

In 1995, he relocated to Austin, accepting a lead developer role at Conquer, a Trilogy, Inc. division which was spun off and renamed pcOrder.com before it went public just ahead of the dot-com implosion. Prior to starting Travelaxe, Samos was the Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Knowitall, Inc., a software firm that developed collaboration technologies for businesses. After the firm was acquired in 2001, he found himself unemployed and wanting to travel.

"I was spending four to five hours each time looking for a good hotel deal. I eventually got tired and wrote a program to acquire all the information and show me which website had the best deal automatically," he recalls. "In becoming the ultimate consumer of my own tool, I realized that no other company existed that was harnessing the distributed power of the Internet to save travelers real time and real money.

"There are lots of travel websites, but they often have drastically different prices for the same hotel rooms, and each website has a different set of hotels," Samos notes. "Most importantly, no one single website has the best rates. A manual comparison between travel websites requires a lot of time, and time is money to both consumers and corporations."

Visit Travelaxe at www.travelaxe.com Travelaxe - Side-by-side travel site comparisons, fast!

SOURCE Travelaxe