A wheel from one of the wagons our descendants traveled in to their homestead in Wyoming in the 1800's.

I’m sure you’ve seen the “Ask Friends Who Know” query box on Uptake’s main page. I thought I’d share with you my experience with using this feature. Yes! Not only do I WORK for Uptake, I’m also a customer!

My husband’s father passed away in early December, which prompted a last-minute road trip to Wyoming from our home in Arizona. Concerned about snowfall and road closures, I posted the following question in the “Ask Friends” query box at 9:22 a.m. on December 21st:

“What is the best winter driving route from Phoenix to Cheyenne? We’re trying to avoid treacherous routes and road closures!”

At 10:14 a.m. on the same day (less than an hour later!) I received this response from John Johnson:

“This time of year its best to avoid the mountains if it all possible. With this in mind, from Phoenix I would take Highway 89 North to Salt Lake City, then merge onto Northbound Interstate 15 towards Beaver.

Take exit 298 and merge onto Interstate 215 West (Belt Route), from there take exit 20A and merge onto Utah 201 East.

Continue on until you see the signs to merge onto Interstate 80 East. Take exit 358 (W. Lincolnway) off Interstate 80 and this will put you in downtown Cheyenne.”

We followed John’s recommended route EXACTLY and had precisely ZERO issues. We drove straight through to Salt Lake City (nearly 12 hours!) and stayed overnight at the Little America Hotel, which was just lovely. Then we drove the remaining way to our relative’s home in Wyoming.

John’s advice gave us considerable peace of mind in a trying time, and for that we were grateful. I had faith and confidence in his recommendations because of my faith and confidence in the Uptake community.

So. My advice to you all is to take advantage of that lovely feature the next time you find yourself traveling!

Photo credit: Tiffany Joyce

Until a few years back, a vacation meant piling the kids into the back and hitting the road. But times change, and now you have a whole new bunch of requirements to fulfill before you can even think about the beach, a cold beer and some peace and quiet.

Beach Vacation

If you don’t want your neighbors and colleagues to look down on you, follow this list of ’friendly’ things that your vacation has to be.

1. Environment-friendly:- It’s bad enough that your vacation destroys your entire year’s savings. Don’t let your vacation be blamed for the destruction of the earth. Find a destination which cares about their surroundings, get a green hotel, try to avoid trips by air and don’t do stuff which will be harmful to the environment – like wasting water, and leaving trash and beer cans in the outdoors or on the road. Read More »

We launched UpTake to make the entire travel planning process easier and we started with the specific goal of improving the first step in the travel planning process – helping consumers decide where to go, where to stay and what to do. With our new Series B investment led by Trinity Ventures, we will build on the progress we achieved since our Series A investment from Shasta Ventures and accelerate our growth.

How do we plan to grow? First, we will expand our search offering beyond UpTake Hotels into new categories including: UpTake Lodging, UpTake Things to Do, UpTake Restaurants and UpTake Beaches. Second, we will improve our ability to deliver travel recommendations based on our analysis and filtering of collective intelligence and on consumers’ specific travel preferences. Lastly, when it makes sense, we will accelerate our growth through acquisitions.

We solve information overload to help you make decisions with confidence

We know from external research and internal consumer studies that the primary challenge for you (“you” being the quintessential consumer traveler more interested in your trip experience then the absolute lowest price) in deciding where to go, where to stay and what to do is that there is too much information scattered across too many sources. And when you can’t find a trusted friend who has been there before to give you advice, you turn to web search and swim through that ocean of unorganized, fragmented information to find the relevant bits of information you need. A Google study shows the average traveler completes 12 searches and visits 22 sites before booking. For every search for flights you might do, you will do ten more searches on what to do, where to stay, where to eat, etc. You also want much more then prices, you want photos, maps, descriptions, reviews et al. This translates to approximately 10 billion travel-related web searches annually.

At UpTake, we are solving this information overload problem. We have aggregated 20 million opinions and information from over 1,000 web sites on 400,000 products and organized it to help you find everything in one place.

We aren’t helping you ‘just’ with hotels, but also with campgrounds, beaches, museums, theme parks, spas and all the activities that make your trips memorable.

We recommend based on understanding collective intelligence

Our approach is unique. Like Google, we aggregate all the existing information we can find (but unlike Google, we just do travel).

However, we have a better understanding of the aggregated information so we can organize and present it better (e.g. romantic hotels, kid-friendly things to do).  How? That’s a long explanation. The short version is that we extract sentiments and metadata from reviews, descriptions, blogs, articles so we can recommend specific options tailored to your preferences – and explain why we are making the recommendation.

We are complementary to existing travel companies

We specifically built our product and our business to be complementary with the travel industry. We are an information search application that aggregates and analyzes travel information, displays the most relevant abstracts with the information provider’s brand displayed, and drives free, qualified leads to the information provider when the consumer wants more than we display. As a search company, we are not a content creator, a “destination site,” a community site, a content publisher, a trip organizing site, or a booking engine. We simply help people search existing travel information to make better decisions.

Because of our complementary approach, a number of information providers wanted us to display more of their information, faster. That’s why we created our Content Partner Program – so that you can send us feeds rather then wait for us to crawl your site. Let us know if you want to participate.

We are looking forward to improving travel search over the next few years, if you would like to partner with us, just have a few questions, or would like to send feedback please email me (yen at uptake.com).

p.s. we are looking to add a few, very talented data, search and application engineers to our team – please send along folks you think would be a good fit; thanks in advance!

Elisabeth Osmeloski (now at the vacation rentals site Zonder) just posted on Search Engine Watch about Travel Search 2.0 and I thought I’d add my own two cents (albeit more travel search centric view) to this topic.

Elizabeth:

As the OTA’s and the meta travel/comparison engines have become so firmly entrenched, the only thing to do is build upon the experience and create added value around the basic layer of content you have. It’s no longer enough to just push rates and dates — publishers must blend together a variety of information, including maps, user reviews, editorial reviews, images, a community platform, sharing widgets and bookmarking tools for trip planning assistance, and direction on the booking process to top it all off.

We couldn’t agree more. TravelMuse recently launched and I also had the opportunity to talk briefly with Kevin Fliess, founder and CEO of TravelMuse. As I blogged in my earlier post about travel planning, I’m excited about the rise of new travel planning startups like TravelMuse. My perspective is that travel planning is a complicated workflow (that often involves multiple people) and a variety of tools will emerge to serve this need. We do have the dream of integrating with a number of tools and community sites, but right now are dealing with post-launch startup issues like serving pages fast and keeping the servers up! So our brief chat with Kevin helped us think more broadly about how the travel landscape will look in the future.

So what is TravelMuse?

Destination Guides

Elizabeth does a good just summarizing the TravelMuse approach to Destination Guides. From Elizabeth:

The primary focus of the site is high quality content, with a blend of traditional travel journalism and articles that work especially well in the online and social media space (e.g., Top 10 lists). In almost “magazine” style, but unquestionably in a 2.0 format, publishing a new “issue” weekly with a healthy dose of high-quality photography, the content side of things is well covered, at least in the featured destinations done to date. On top of the editorial content, User-generated content (UGC) plays an enormous role.

TravelMuse won’t stop there. User-generated content and professional content working hand-in-hand is the approach that Kevin, Eric, and the team intends to take. For example, I posted a user review of the Le Meridien San Francisco page on TravelMuse just to try it out.

Inspiration Finder

TravelMuse has an interesting inspiration finder. The early stage of travel planning is indeed inspiration and discovery, and TravelMuse has developed an interesting “wizard” like approach that allows you to express what you want:

TravelMuse Planner

The TravelMuse Planner has two components. One is a cool bookmarklet tool that allows you to clip any page on the Web and add it to your itinerary.

It then has a Trip Planner that organizes all the content into one area.

I was even able to add the San Diego things to do page from Kango.com on this planning tool!

TravelMuse

TravelMuse is trying to address the early inspiration, discovery and planning phase of travel planning. They are trying to stitch together all phases of this initial process together in an integrated whole. My experience as an end user is as follows:

1. Destination guides provided great professional editorial and great photos. It is truly an inspiring site with great visuals and great ideas for travel. The large number of themes supported also address the inspiration and dreaming phase of trip planning.
2. Trip Planner. There is definitely use for a trip planner, and I really like the idea of a bookmarklet. TravelMuse has done it well and allows you to tag Web pages as a specific type of travel product so it is better organized in your trip planner. Disclosure: Uptake also has what we call a “trip folder” in the Alpha stage and we expect a bookmarklet to be included in that tool as well.
3. Trip Inspiration Tool. The wizard approach is a fun way to discover different destinations. However, there should be more ways to change the criteria you used on the suggestion page. For example, I initially chose “within 4 hours” of SFO and then later I wanted to go “within 2 hours” of SFO and had to redo the whole search. There should be some adjustment right there on the inspiration page.

TravelMuse is bringing much needed innovation to the travel space and we expect they will play a role in revolutionizing the way people use the Web to plan travel!