SnowTrax quietly launched as a comparative search and booking engine for ski vacations.
The website compares up to five ski resorts and their features at a time, shows airfares at nearby airports and hotels across multiple mountains, details the mileage from the hotel to ski lifts and bus stops, and presents inventory from ski travel vendors and online travel agencies.
And, unlike metasearch engines, such as Skyscanner which unveiled a trip-planning service for ski holidays, Bethesda, Md.-based SnowTrax serves as an OTA for the ski market and handles the bookings itself.
It also provides some ski inspiration -- presenting ski package ideas and expert opinion to what SnowTrax labels Destination Agnostic Travelers -- people who know they want to go skiing, but don't know where to go.
Ski vacation, adventure travel and vacation rental providers all are considered part of the long tail of travel distribution. Namely, they are often forgotten or neglected as large players and intermediaries focus on major airlines, hotel chains and car rental companies.
So, how does SnowTrax access all of the disparate inventory which goes into a ski package?
SnowTrax President Joe Bous says the company accesses the inventory directly from suppliers, including hotels, ski resorts and vacation rental management companies, and from wholesalers, as well.
"Ski inventory comes into our availability engine via live XML feeds and inventory loaded into our Extranet," Bous says. "Additional inventory, including lift tickets, ski rentals and ski instruction packages will be live soon, and thisis all sourced directly from ski resorts."
SnowTrax goes the standards route and forsakes it, depending on the supplier.
"In the cases where the supplier uses the OpenTravel schema, we do use it," Bous says. "Otherwise, we use whatever the supplier uses."
The website lists a support phone number, but Bous says all inventory is booked online.
"One of the main differentiations between SnoTrax and the bulk of our competitors in the online ski space is that rather than displaying cached data, requiring users to dial into a call center or make a quote request, we display real-time pricing that can be booked on-site," Bous says.
SnowTrax conducted a soft launch in September.
Its parent company is Airfare.com, an airline consolidator, and the two companies plan to do cross-selling.
Bous is the founder of Airfare.com.