BEIJING—Entrepreneurs seeking riches in China’s frenetic economy take inspiration from myriad sources. For American-born Fritz Demopoulos, it came from the beat literature of the late 1950s.

“For some people it’s Tony Robbins. For me, it was definitely Kerouac,” said Mr. Demopoulos, who launched his latest Internet venture, Qunar.com, in Beijing on Thursday.

“After reading On the Road again last fall I was completely motivated to start a business,” he said over a sandwich at a Beijing coffee shop. “I had to get my kicks.”

Mr. Demopoulos, 36, knows what those kicks feel like. After leaving the job at News Corp. that first brought him to Beijing in 1998, he and partner Douglas Khoo started a Chinese-language sports portal called Shawei.com despite the fact that Mr. Demopoulos spoke almost no Chinese at the time.

In December 2000, as air gushed out of the Internet bubble, he sold the company to Hong Kong-based Tom.com for $15 million.

After serving six months at Tom to oversee the transition, and taking a few more months off to work on his Mandarin, he surprised many industry watchers when he signed on with beleaguered Chinese Internet portal Netease.com to head business development.

Netease was then at its nadir: the United States Securities and Exchange Commission had suspended trade in the portal’s stock on the Nasdaq after the company allegedly overstated revenues, and its stock price was barely over $0.60. When Mr. Demopolous left Netease in 2003, its stock price had risen to over $50.

Mr. Demopolous has a reputation for a Midas touch, but he dismisses it as merely good luck. He credits Netease’s recovery to the vision of founder William Ding Lei and acting CEO Ted Sun. Still, he's been courted by Chinese companies throughout the telecoms, media, and Internet space.

Shawei ReunionHe’s limited his involvement to consulting, all the while working on charitable projects for Chinese youth and looking for the right opportunity to bring the Shawei.com team—Mr. Khoo, former Shawei CTO C.C. Zhuang, and several of the old site’s original engineers—back together for another venture.

The team has been intrigued by the booming paid search business in China that has propelled market leader Baidu toward a likely Nasdaq listing before September, plus last year’s IPOs of Chinese airline ticket and hotel reservation web sites eLong.com and Ctrip.com.

Mr. Demopoulos saw travel services, with their fast-changing, wide range of pricing, as an ideal area for price-comparison search. Qunar—the q is pronounced like the “ch” in “cheer”—means “where are you going?” in Mandarin.

It’s an appropriate name for a travel services search engine that pulls together prices and other information for hotels and airfares from over 150 different web sites all over China. They include airlines and hotel web sites, online ticketing providers like Nasdaq-listed eLong.com and C-Trip.com, and dozens of ticketing agencies large and small.

Rather than processing payments, making reservations, and delivering tickets, Qunar provides only information. Mr. Demopolous said the challenge in combining so many disparate sources, “is in taking all this unstructured and semi-structured data, extracting it, and putting it into a form that’s going to be useful for the consumer.”

The information it provides is valuable: a random sampling of ticket prices on Qunar.com shows discounts as deep as 70 percent for common air routes, and a range of as much as 40 percent in identical hotel rooms offered through different online booking services.

Affiliate SiteQunar will be free to customers, and will derive revenue from two main sources, said Mr. Demopoulos: from paid search, and from referral fees paid on consummated transactions by web sites and other ticketing and reservation providers to whom customers are directed. The company plans to promote its service through affiliate web sites.

Mr. Demopoulos’s new venture, which was developed and launched on founder investment of approximately $50,000 (the founders have deferred any salary), is now talking to VCs in China and in Silicon Valley and hoping to raise $3 million to $5 million in a Series A. He says he plans to expand the site to Japan, Korea, India, and English-speaking Southeast Asia in the near future.

At present, however, Qunar software engineers have to attack each new searched site individually in order to be able to extract and process relevant data—flight numbers, aircraft types, flight times, ticket and hotel room prices, room ratings, and so on. This makes the model difficult to scale.

“Some of the savvy VCs we’ve talked to ask technology questions. They realize there are limits to the scalability,” said Mr. Demopoulos.

But successful U.S. and European travel search sites like Mobissimo, Kayak, and Sidestep all face this same problem, he noted. “One VC suggested that we license Mobissimo’s technology,” said Mr. Demopoulos. “But after he compared the two, he said he’d talk to Mobissimo about licensing ours.”

Mobissimo CEO Beatrice Tarka noted wryly that, at least so far, she hasn’t heard such a proposal. Mobissimo, an English-language site that derives revenue from both advertising and affiliate relationships, already conducts 1 million searches a month for visitors from 174 countries, she said.

San Mateo, California-based Mobissimo was started with the help of $1.1 million in seed money from Cambrian Ventures, Index Ventures, and Benhamou Global Venture. Ms. Tarka said the company doesn’t plan to seek additional funding until after it becomes profitable.

As it happens, Ms. Tarka’s company also may be going on the road. It’s formulating plans to launch a French version of the site at the end of the summer, and Mr. Demopoulos should note that her ambitions don’t stop there.

“First, we’ll move into Europe,” she said. “And then we will have a plan to move into Asia.”