Surprising move by the two largest travel meta-search engines - they become one! Ken Schachter at Redherring comments:

Travel search engine Kayak.com has pulled down $196 million in one of the largest venture rounds of 2007 to acquire rival SideStep, the companies announced Friday.

The financing round was led by prior investor Sequoia Capital, whose partner, Michael Moritz, will join the Kayak.com board of directors. Also, participating were previous Kayak investors General Catalyst Partners and Accel Partners, SideStep investors Norwest Venture Partners and Trident Capital and new investors Oak Investment Partners and Lehman Brothers Venture Partners. The round also included debt from Silicon Valley Bank and Gold Hill Capital.

"It's an extraordinary amount of money to raise," Kayak co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Paul English said. "It's more than a lot of tech IPOs raise."

The acquisition of SideStep accounted for more than $150 million of the venture funding with exiting SideStep investors tapping additional funds from the company's cash horde. Kayak previously had raised $30 million in three venture rounds.

....

Kayak is taking aim at Expedia, the No. 1 web site based on travel searches per month, Mr. English said. At the same time, Kayak partners with Expedia by referring searchers to that site, which serves as a ticket-selling agency. He likened the relationship to a shopping search engine like shopping.com and a retailer like BestBuy.

Travel meta-search seems to be an interesting addition to the rather big online travel market. Being invested and involved in kinkaa I certainly do share some of these bullish forecasts.

Talk was on the street that each Sidestep and Kayak want to go IPO in 2008. Now that will be only KYAK on Nasdaq in 2008 :)