Travelogia, QIXO offer airfare search product

IRVINE, Calif. -- TraveLogia.com, the newest entrant in the online travel market, has launched a comprehensive one-stop travel Web site offering all free online members access to the "lowest travel deals on the Web," many of which the company says are not available through other travel sites.

TraveLogia.com also announced a multi-million dollar agreement to acquire a majority interest in QIXO, a travel technology company that gained national recognition through its existing Web-based comparison engine that searches 20 major airline and travel web sites simultaneously for the lowest fares. Daniel Ko will continue as president and CEO of QIXO, which is headquartered in San Francisco with locations in Korea and London.

TraveLogia.com was founded this year by Adam Gilmer, president and CEO. The company's primary investor is Greg Neely, a Cleveland, Ohio, businessman who sold his Alabama-based cellular phone company in January 2002, to Verizon Wireless for more than $100 million.

Comprehensive menu

"Our agreement to acquire the majority interest in QIXO will further establish TraveLogia.com as a strong competitive force in the market," Gilmer said. "Our combined technology resources and our comprehensive menu of travel products will enable us to provide the consumer significantly better value compared to most other online travel sites."

TraveLogia.com's Web site offers consumers multiple booking options for air, hotel and car rental pricing. Gilmer said no single air, hotel or car rental booking engine can guarantee all the lowest fares or prices. Offering multiple, real-time booking engine options from various established discount travel providers provides TraveLogia.com customers with more options, greater savings and discounts. In addition to its online travel programs, TraveLogia.com provides toll-free phone number support with professional travel agents for any type of travel reservation.

"The TraveLogia.com and QIXO union could not be more ideal for consumers who have longed for a single source for their online travel planning," said Daniel Ko, founder and CEO of QIXO. "Until now, travelers typically spent a considerable amount of time visiting multiple travel web sites to compare the lowest fares, which is a departure from what the spirit of the Internet is all about: immediate access to shop, plan and obtain information."

Comparison shopping

QIXO developed real-time comparison shopping technology for travel. Ko said existing QIXO booking engine helps millions of travelers find the best airfares over 20 airfare sites without spending hours looking up each site. Travelers save up to hundreds of dollars using QIXO's comparison technology because travel Web sites frequently have different prices for airfares, hotel rooms, or car rentals as well as flight times, numbers of flight connections, hotel locations and quality, he said.

"Given the state of the economy and the airline industry today, more consumers and corporate travelers are turning to the Web to book their travel plans, continuing the fast growth of the online travel market. Our mission is simple: to provide consumers the lowest possible travel prices all in one place, saving time and money for our customers."

Gilmer said that TraveLogia.com has a private label marketing agreement with the world's largest seller of cruises, providing instant access to some of the lowest cruise prices available online. TraveLogia.com also provides an extensive worldwide listing of deeply discounted vacation packages and over 1,000,000 last-minute travel specials at any given time.

For the more adventurous, TraveLogia.com has announced it will soon offer Space Adventures that will allow its free members to book Shuttle Launch Tours with an astronaut as host or go on Zero-Gravity Flights, Edge of Space Flights, Sub-Orbital Space Flights and much more. These are once-in-a-lifetime travel opportunities not offered by any other major online travel membership program.

TraveLogia.com also provides a menu of helpful information including travel tips, over 20,000 streaming destination videos, weather reports, currency converter, travel insurance, health and medical abroad, embassy listings, traveling with pets and other content for travelers.

TraveLogia.com's customer acquisition model offers a free 3-day, 2-night hotel vacation (redeemable at 21 destination cities in the U.S. and Mexico) plus over $1,000 in travel savings vouchers to all free online members. Registration is free. Membership is free.

In addition to Gilmer, TraveLogia.com's executive team includes:

▪ Jon Snyder, President of Travel Services. A 35-year travel industry veteran, Snyder was formerly President & Managing Director for American Airlines' worldwide leisure travel division, Fly AAway Vacations. Most recently, he was President of Leisure Travel for a publicly traded company and coordinated the integration of 20 additional travel-related acquisitions. Prior to that, he founded and co-managed a vacation travel company which was sold after 14 months of profitable operation for $6 million.

▪ Rick Levin, Co-Founder & Vice President. Levin has a 17-year background in the tourism and hospitality industries. Prior to joining TraveLogia.com, he co-founded and served as president of Club Travel, Inc. (CTI). CTI developed and managed private labeled travel websites for large membership organizations and affinity groups. In its first 24 months, CTI's products and services touched more than eight million paper-based members; had signed contracts with client organizations that represented over 35 million members and operated over 2,100 private label travel Web sites.

QIXO and TraveLogia will offer BoardingPass, a free desktop software program that simultaneously searches the top 28 airline sites for the lowest airfares, then allows customers to book air directly at their selected site.

Joint venture

This new software represents a joint venture between TraveLogia.com and QIXO. TraveLogia claims the BoardingPass cutting-edge superiority over existing airfare comparison engines is that it not only searches more sites than any previous product, but also overcomes their biggest obstacle by running directly from each individual user's computer.

Gilmer said that unlike all other major travel Web sites, TraveLogia BoardingPass is a software program that searches and identifies the lowest available fares listed by other major online travel companies, including Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz and CheapTickets, among others. Customers can compare the results and book the fare that meets their preferences. Also, TraveLogia BoardingPass provides an innovative way to ferret out the ideal airfare from dozens of airfares gathered from the 28 sites, allowing consumers to gather the fares into one simple list and quickly sort them by price, flight times, airline or number of stops.

Gilmer said all airfare comparison engines run on the provider's servers and are accessed simultaneously by thousands of online travelers and often fail to return results from all the airfare sites they are supposed to search. In addition, those engines cannot search certain airfare sites that block them.

TraveLogia BoardingPass is a client-based software program which relies entirely on a user's computer with their Internet connection and requires no Web servers. This proprietary software can be downloaded for free on either the Travelogia or QIXO Web sites starting Sunday October 6, 2002.