Vacations Blog

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!

From guest blogger, Craig Grimes, of AccessibleBarcelona.

Planning an Accessible Trip

The first part of any vacation or trip for anyone, regardless of if they have a disability or not, is planning and it is the initial step to accomplishing your goal. The planning stage of the trip is especially important for disabled people as through good planning many problems and issues can be avoided right from the start, leaving the individual to relax and enjoy their time away from home.

Destination Choice

With so many fantastic and interesting places to visit in the world, how do you chose your destination? Accessibility of places may play a large role in the decision you make about where you would like to go and it varies in different ways from continent to continent, country to country and even city to city. The only definite fact is that adjustments are going to have to be made and you will not be as comfortable as you would be in your home environment. Everyone makes this sacrifice when traveling; it’s all part of the experience.

On a global scale areas can be put into three very general categories:

1. A variety of establishments with facilities for the disabled: USA, Canada, Northern Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
2. Some establishments with facilities for the disabled: Southern and Eastern Europe.
3. Very few establishments with facilities for the disabled: Latin America, Asia and Africa.

When referring to “establishments” this is not only accommodation but also tourist attractions such as national monuments, museums, other sights of interest and also accessible transport.

For the gung-ho disabled traveler, access may not be an issue at all and you may be willing to put up with any conditions and take all the help you can get in order to visit exactly what you want to see regardless of the difficulties.

A great way of getting ideas for your next vacation is by browsing through other disabled travelers blogs, web sites of specialist travel agents and other organizations that provide information relating to inclusive travel for all. Here are a few to get you started:

Travel Blogs by Disabled People and their Families

NZ on Wheelsis a blog about access and travel in New Zealand and Australia.
Both Barrier Free TravelsGet Around Guideby Darren Hillcock give useful ideas for vacations in various locations.
Accessible Everything by Craig Grimes gives an insight into traveling Europe and Latin America.
Gimp on the Go by Andrew Lloyd has reviews of traveling all over the world, a great resource.
Rolling Rains Report by Scott Rains is about Universal Design and Inclusive Travel providing many useful links and information.
Disabled Travelers A travel blog and website all rolled into one by Jeremy Rynders.

Specialist Travel Agents

Holidays For All is a group of travel agents and charities the specialize in vacations mainly in Europe for disabled people.
Can be Done has a great search engine for looking up accessible hotels mainly in Europe and the USA as does AccessAtLast.

Other Organizations

Global Access News has disabled contributors from around the world that share their experiences of traveling.
Accessible Adventures is a web page about safaris for disabled people by Gordon Rattray and it also includes a world map with links to other web sites. A great site for unconventional vacations for the disabled.
E-bility gives lots of ideas fro traveling in Australia.
MAKOA – “disability information and resources” gives hundreds of links to different travel web sites across the world.
Access Able provides world wide travel resources

Next up, Part II: Getting to the Destination

Do you have any tips to share about planning disabled travel? Please share!

Kango just announced the launch of our private beta yesterday morning and we would like to know what you think of our site. Please sign up for a private beta invitation and let us know what you like and what we can improve.

We recognize we have a long way to go to achieve our vision of becoming your first step for planning your trip. We look forward to your feedback.

In the meantime, the blogosphere has started giving us their candid opinions:

• Dan Kaplan at VentureBeat says, we have built “a technology with a refreshing spin on travel search…so someone looking for a family vacation in, say, Big Sur will see a different set of results than someone seeking romance or adventure. Kango’s technology extracts the sentiment from the postings it indexes and only shows results for locations that get positive buzz. If you’re looking for activities, you can filter using a number of criteria, including theme parks, playgrounds, wineries and breweries, and spas.”

• Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch highlights that Kango “looks at travel reviews and other information across the Web and automatically generates tags so it can categorize results by how “kid friendly” or “romantic” they may be.”

• Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim says ”if you have been waiting for social media to take on the travel industry, your wait is over” with Kango’s debut.

• Rafe Needleman of Webware (CNET) “found the search results page excellent” and that “the product philosophy makes sense.”

• Anne Zelenka from GigaOm says, “Kango could eliminate some of the multi-web site research that many vacationers undertake.”

But it’s not all rosy of course (otherwise we wouldn’t be in private beta!). Rafe points out that our search experience isn’t quite there, for example, we don’t cover surfing in Hawaii. Most bloggers commented that they would like Kango to cover more than California and Hawaii.

How do we do what the bloggers are talking about? We have aggregated and analyzed more than 20 million traveler opinions from more than 1,000 sites across the Web. We use natural language analysis and travel-specific term mapping to deliver reliable, relevant recommendations for you. This means you can now include subjective criteria like ‘romantic’ or objective criteria like price and ‘internet access’ and get relevant results.

With Kango, if you are looking for a romantic getaway in San Francisco, you will get different hotel and activity recommendations than if you are looking for a family vacation in San Francisco. We try to deliver search results by understanding your intention, so ‘good for kids’ is interpreted the same way as ‘child friendly’ or ‘family vacation’. The result of all this is Kango – a travel search application that helps you discover new travel choices and make better decisions.For more details about how and what we do, read more here.

We look forward to getting your feedback about how we can improve Kango.

Gene & I founded Kango to make it easy and fun for you to discover information about your travel options and to make better travel decisions. Our mission is for Kango to be your first step to a great trip.

Travel is the largest e-commerce category on the internet with almost $90 billion booked online in 2007. But you still have to buy travel online largely on the basis of “facts”, such as travel dates and price. However, you probably make many your decisions about where to go, where to stay and what to do based on “feelings” –subjective criteria for the kind of experience you wish to have. At Kango, you can discover the right options based on facts and feelings.

Unlike today’s travel sites, we allow you to shop for things to do as well as for lodging – for well-known attractions like the Monterey Bay Aquarium and for hidden gems that locals know about like Dennis the Menace Park. We enable you to get filtered recommendations for things to do and for lodging based on your subjective themes (e.g. romantic San Francisco hotels or family friendly things to do in San Francisco) rather than having to pick through a one-size-fits-all top 10 list.

Unlike web search engines like Google and Yahoo, we do “entity extraction” to organize structured information around specific activity and lodging products. For example, when you type in “Hotel Vitale Embarcadero,” Google returns 12,700 links to different pages on different sites. We return an integrated snapshot of the Hotel Vitale Embarcadero that include descriptions, photos, over 200 reviews, amenities, address and phone number from over 12 sources as well as the official hotel site.

We have a lofty vision about helping you discover the trip that is right for you. This can be a difficult task, like finding a (your) needle in the haystack. We realize we are just getting started. With this in mind, we welcome your feedback. Please sign up for private beta and let us know what you like and more importantly, what we can improve.

I’d like to introduce myself and the other co-conspirators on the Kango project. I’m still a novice blogger, but I’ve learned that people in the blogosphere appreciate transparency and authenticity, and I’ll try to do that, while keeping in mind my family and children’s right to privacy (as highlighted by mommybloggers).

We are working on a new and better way to do travel planning. Some of the stuff we are working on is still in stealth mode. But we can say that we want to apply our ideas and technology especially to family travel. Prior to having kids, my wife and I traveled to lots of places: Switzerland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Peru, Tanzania, Kenya, Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Singapore, China, Thailand, and Malaysia. After having kids, we’ve traveled a lot less. But when we have, it has been incredibly rewarding. For example, we brought our 1st child to Italy when he was 6 months old, and just found that the country opened up to us in a way that I wouldn’t have imagined.

My background is in consumer software and internet. I’ve started a few companies in internet marketing services, and also worked on some great products at Microsoft (Word, PowerPoint) and at Intuit (QuickBooks).

My mission with Kango is to help people have memorable and fulfilling travel experiences with the ones they love! I’m interested in connecting with people who like travel. Family vacations and travel with babies and toddlers is especially relevant for me right now!