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Travel search engines focus specifically on helping visitors purchase travel products, such as airline tickets, automobile rentals, hotel rooms, cruise tickets, and so on. They are "domain-specific" in contrast to search engines which search all sites on the World Wide Web. Most have comparison shopping capabilities, allowing visitors to compare offers from multiple competing vendors.

The market was created by FareChase prior to its being acquired by Yahoo!. Sidestep was a downloadable application and did not adopt the model until the second phase of its product.

Travel search engines (also known as "meta-search engines") separate online travel search from travel purchase. This separation of search from purchase has become standard in almost every other online shopping category.

Sidestep was the first popular travel search engine. Their sidebar appeared in the browser any time the user searched another travel site, and allowed that user to then search for the same travel on other sites.

Before these new travel search engines appeared, most online travel was purchased through one of the big Online Travel Agencies (OTAs).

As the new travel search engines allow a consumer to directly search airline and hotel websites, the consumer can often find deals not available at the OTA websites and can also save the consumer the additional booking fees charged by the OTAs.

On-line engines are based on the belief that the OTAs only show consumers airlines and hotels where they can make good profits. Thus the OTAs usually can not show low-cost carriers such as Jetblue, and their hotel inventory and displays are also highly biased to the hotels which pay the OTAs the most money.

In addition to these new travel search engines, there are now some simple travel search tools which allow a user to enter their search criteria in one window, and then to display results from each selected travel site in its own window. While this approach lacks the ability to filter and sort results from multiple sites, it does allow a user access to launch the same search across multiple OTAs.

Some do not compare prices but instead concentrate on searching all available routes served by low-cost airlines. Visitors are typically referred to the appropriate airline website to complete the booking process.

• Travel technology
• Travel advisory

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