Vacations Blog

On Wednesday, September 17, UpTake announced it received  more than $10 million in new funding, including a Series B round of investment led by Trinity Ventures and Shasta Ventures, and additional backing from other sources. The new funding built on our Series A round of $4 million from Shasta Ventures announced in December 2007, when we opened the site to its first private beta users.

We will use the new funding to achieve three main objectives. First, we will expand search beyond UpTake Hotels into new categories including:  UpTake Lodging, UpTake Things to Do, UpTake Restaurants and UpTake Beaches.  Second, we will invest in our search technology to improve travel recommendations based on its analysis and filtering of collective intelligence. Lastly, we will pursue opportunities to grow the company through acquisitions.

We also announced a new Content Partner Program to enable publishers to provide their most up-to-date content to the UpTake visitor. UpTake partners include: BedandBreakfast.com, Restauranti.ca, OpenTable, La Quinta Inn & Suites, Away.com, and FriendCommunications, the leader in online reservations for RV parks and campgrounds.“

Here are the highlights of the media coverage resulting from the announcement:

VentureBeat

UpTake, the travel search engine that gets its traffic from Google, takes in $10M

“Unlike many content-focused travel sites, which seem to proliferate daily (see TripWolf, IgoUgo, TripSay), UpTake has no illusions about becoming the first place people turn for travel info. It has instead built a strategy almost entirely based around aggregating high-quality content from other sources and pulling in traffic from travel searches executed on major search engines.”

TechCrunch

UpTake Raises $10 Million in Series B Funding

“The funding round was led by Trinity Ventures, which ostensibly believes UpTake has a bright future ahead of it.”"Considering it’s competing in a well-trodden space where sites like TripConnect and TripHub have failed, it’ll be interesting to see if the travel search engine can transition from an SEO-driven strategy to a more natural uptake.”

ZDNet

UpTake Announces $10,000,000 investment with a new Series B

“As I reported back in May when the company entered public beta, they’re applying some interesting semantic approaches in an attempt to enhance the quality of results.”

TheDeal.com

UpTake travels in style with $10M

“Calling itself a travel search and discovery Web site, UpTake wants to be the first place travelers look when deciding where to go on vacation, where to stay and what to do. It searches more than 1,000 other travel sites and scours the Web for other travelers’ opinions to provide matches to help people make better travel decisions.” 

Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal

Travel Search Site UpTake gets $10M

“UpTake said it will use the new funding expand search functions, invest in technology to improve travel recommendations based on analysis and filtering of collective intelligence, and pursue opportunities to grow the company through acquisitions.”

We are looking forward to using these funds to deliver better travel information to our visitors and as a result give them a better trip.If you need further information, we like Paul Miller’s analysis of UpTake written for our public beta announcement on The Semantic Web.  If you are looking for more press and blogger information, go here.

This post was contributed by Mark Britton, founder and CEO of Avvo.

With this year’s American Airlines groundings, flight consolidations and difficult weather, a lot of people are once again talking about passengers’ rights.  Being the ex-general counsel at Expedia and now running Avvo and its free legal advice Q&A forum, I am often asked about these rights. Most people are certain that they have them, but are less certain about what they are.

Allow me to disappoint up front by telling everyone that passengers’ rights are a myth.  Just as the Greeks ultimately learned that there was really no Zeus to cast lightning bolts at their greatest enemies, it is time for travelers to realize that there is really no one to help them if an airline treats them poorly.  What about the Federal Aviation Administration?  What about the Department of Transportation?  While these illustrious federal entities set some guidelines for the airlines, since airline deregulation in the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, virtually all of your rights are dictated by the airline’s carriage agreement.

What is this mysterious carriage agreement, you ask? When you buy an airline ticket, the airline clearly discloses that you are entering into an agreement (i.e.a binding contract) with the airline. You agree to give them your hard earned cash, and they agree to give you certain services in return. If one of your “rights” is not in that agreement, then it doesn’t exist.  “But hold on,” you say.  “I hear about passengers’ rights all of the time on the news.”  And you are correct. The problem is that you are talking about legislation that has been either PROPOSED at the federal level or OVERTURNED at the state level; so while we hear a lot about passengers’ rights, nothing currently exists.

While bills have been proposed by both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, both bills have largely stalled in the face of the formidable airline lobby. Frustrated with Congress’ inaction, a number of states (including Arizona, Florida, New Jersey, New York and Washington) began mulling over their own legislation relating to passengers’ rights.

The first to act was New York.  In response to, among other things, nine JetBlue flights that sat on runways at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport in 2007 for more than six hours during an ice storm, the New York State Legislature enacted the Consumer Bill of Rights Regarding Airline Passengers.  In general, the legislation required that airlines provide passengers on aircraft delayed more than three hours with electricity for fresh air and lighting, food, water and clean lavatories.  t also created an Office of the Airline Consumer Advocate and gave New York authorities the power to seek substantial civil penalties against airlines for violations.

Fearing that multiple states would follow New York, the Air Transport Association (ATA), the heart of the airline lobby, filed a suit in federal court attempting to stop the New York legislation.  In a nutshell, they argued that federal law conflicted with (and therefore preempted) the New York law.  While the lower court upheld the law, earlier this year the U.S. Court of Appeals struck it down, largely relying on the ATA’s preemption argument.

And so the vanguard of passengers’ rights legislation died an untimely death.  Whether Congress or any state will pick up the torch again is anyone’s guess.  With galactically high oil prices and an airline industry hanging on its teeth, I am guessing that it will be hard for any legislator to throw a new punch.

We shall see.

If you have any more questions about your rights when you travel, or any other legal question, get them answered at Avvo.  You can go directly to our free legal advice Q&A forum to ask your personal legal questions-anonymously if desired-and real attorneys will answer them.

Happy traveling.

Mark Britton

Founder and CEO

Avvo, Inc.

Photo courtesy of  Oishi Kuranosuke

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!

So you spend $18,500 to launch with 70+ startups on a big, prestigious launch event.  Then blogger Robert Scoble, who isn’t even going to be there because he is watching another 50+ startups at another launch event, says that almost all the 70+ Websites that are part of that show basically sucks.  Its enough to make a grown man cry.

Well, Robert, TravelMuse doesn’t suck.  In fact, Travolution said if TravelMuse sucks, then there isn’t hope for 100s of others. And according to travel industry blogger Alex Bainbridge, they are unveiling their secret plans, showing the world they are more than Yet Another Travel Content Site (YATCS?) and in fact are rolling out workflow tools to aid travelers in the complex travel planning process.  Well maybe Robert Scoble didn’t get it, but we’ve been on to TravelMuse’s secret plans for world domination for some time now, and blogged about it here, here, and here.  That’s why we partnered with them!

TravelMuse launches TravelMuse Planner

The TravelMuse Planner is the next installment in the suite of planning tools TravelMuse is developing.  Here’s a screenshot from their press kit that shows how the TravelMuse planner allows multiple people to collaborate on trip planning if they are all part of TravelMuse.

Once you have created multiple itineraries, you can manage them in a queue using drag-and-drop to rearrange and move them around.

It’s a logical extension of what TravelMuse has already done with the bookmarking widget that we’ve choosen to incorporate into the UpTake site, even in advance of our own pre-alpha trip folder feature.  It allows you to bookmark content from across the Web–including the hotels, alternative lodging, things to do, beaches and restaurants at UpTake– and manage and save all of that into one trip itinerary or many.  Trip plans can be managed by dragging and dropping different items from one day to another.  Then you can manage the trip planning process with your friends and family who are involved in the process.  Sharing out the trip plans with friends and family will allow everyone to contribute their ideas.

How is this different from TripIt and other itinerary tools?

By combining TravelMuse Planner with their Inspiration Finder and Bookmarking Widget, TravelMuse aims to be useful during the early-stages of trip planning, before anything is even booked.  In our own research, we have found that people do a tremendous amount of trip planning, in fact visiting over 22 sites and using Web search over 12 times, according to a comScore/Google study.  Post-booking organizational tools like TripIt are fundamentally different from TravelMuse because they are looking to help you organize your itinerary AFTER you have booked it.  So you could conceivably use both TravelMuse and TripIt.  Dopplr is probably more useful in the early planning stage, but its really about discovering what your friends are doing and doesn’t have the same bookmarking tools that TravelMuse has.  Dopplr’s strength is that it comes bundled with a social network.  TravelMuse, like TripIt, requires you to email invite your friends to share your itinerary.  On the other hand, my wife won’t even use Facebook and I don’t have any friends on Dopplr anyway (friend me please!) so maybe this isn’t such a big advantage.

Solving the Travel Planning problem is hard–its going to take a village to be successful!

We’ve been happy to work with TravelMuse because they have an open, collaborative approach and share our philosophy that its going to take many different approaches, and lots of consumer choice, before travel planning can improve in a big way.  Our travel meta-search approach is complementary with TravelMuse because once you’ve made a decision with UpTake, you still need the find the right tool for the right job.  There is no way that UpTake alone can provide enough for everyone to complete the trip planning process, and we think the TravelMuse Planner provides a great choice for people to inspire, to plan, and to share trip planning information so they can have better vacations.

Congrats to the TravelMuse team for another exciting chapter in their launch!

Dear friends, please help us tell The Google where we are.

Well, we did it. In March, we shared that we were changing our name from Kango to UpTake. We weren’t happy about having to do this, but we stopped whining and got over it. But we were too busy with our public beta launch in May that we put off the actual redirect of the Kango site to UpTake until now. On Friday 8/23, we flipped the switch.

Now our Google and Yahoo! traffic is GONE!!!

Ok I’m being a bit overdramatic, its not all gone. But its well known that when you do something called a “301 permanent redirect” it takes a little time before you recover. Its as if you are lost to Google. The 301 redirect tells Google where to look, but it takes some time before Google eventually believes what you are telling it. Please find us Google, and please believe that our new domain is a good one! (ritual Google rain dance)

Case Study: eMomsatHome.com switches to Sparkplugging.com

I follow Wendy Piersall (@emom) on Twitter. As Founder of eMomsatHome.com, Wendy decided that she needed to rebrand her site to set it up for broader marketplace success. And she picked a great name, Sparkplugging. Her post entitled “What I wish I had known about Naming a Website and Changing a Domain Name” shares some insights into the process and Wendy also has a nice interview in ProBlogger about her rebranding.

Wendy also knew that there would be a loss of Google traffic:

I knew it was coming – and I really thought I prepared myself adequately. But within 6 days of changing our domain name, even though every single page was redirected accurately, we lost 90% of our traffic from the search engines. And although I won’t tell you just how much that was, suffice it to say that I didn’t sleep for a couple of weeks.

Now, we’re in the “When we’re not Sleeping Zone”

I can’t share our traffic graphs because we’re a venture backed company, etc. etc.   But we’re about 1 centimeter to the left of the “When I Didn’t Sleep” arrow on Wendy’s chart! So looks like we have some sleepless nights ahead. And I’m already pretty sleep deprived from the Olympics!

How you can help.

There is a way you can help. By telling Google you love us.

Google assesses the trust of a new domain based on the links that it receives. With a 301 permanent redirect, Google will eventually credit the links from Kango.com to UpTake, but that will take some time. Fresh, new legitimate links from relevant sites to the new domain may us get our mojo faster back with Google!

We’ve reorganized our content around different topics. With Hotels, Lodging, and general vacation ideas that includes:

• Hotels
• Family Hotels
• Romantic Hotels
• Pet Friendly Hotels
• Camping
• Bed and Breakfasts
• Family Vacations
• Romantic Vacations
• and many more…

With Attractions and things to do, that includes

• general things to do on vacation
• Family things to do
• Romantic and free things to do
• Golf Courses
• Spas
• Parks
• Theme parks
• Beaches
• and many more…

If any of these topics are interesting and can be woven into a blog post, a blogroll, or some other link on your site, it will tell Google that you love us and that they should crawl us again!

I know we will be ok eventually, but with your link love and support, maybe we get Google moving a bit faster.

Thanks in advance and the love will be returned if you ever find yourself in this situation.

UpTake’s mission is to provide the best way to sift and filter through all the travel information, lodging options, and attractions that people need plan a great trip. But in our research, we’ve learned that trip-planning is a complex, circuitous workflow that can differ based on the type of trip or the type of traveler. TravelMuse is one of those companies that are trying to tackle this complex process.

Question: What’s new with TravelMuse?

TravelMuse just announced a new trip planning widget called “Plan-It!” that is kind of like the “Delicious” of travel. You can bookmark pages that you see on the Web and pull it into your TravelMuse Planner.

Question: Isn’t this competitive with UpTake?

No, in fact its complementary. UpTake has already created the comprehensive catalog of travel content out there, based on over 1000 sites. If you are using UpTake, why wouldn’t we you to bookmark our content so you can find it again?

Question: Does this mean you won’t create a trip planner or a bookmarking tool?

No, we never promised to Kevin (TravelMuse’s CEO) that we wouldn’t also have a bookmarklet or planner! In fact, we have one in private alpha. But our philosophy is to give our users choice, and when Kevin came to us with this option, we wanted to stay true to our philosophy by offering access to 3rd party tools like TravelMuse.

Actually, what we really want to focus on is a tool that will allow our users to post reviews to whatever site they are already using. We want to keep our platform open and complementary, and only in that way will we create a great service for travel planners out there.

Question: How does it work?

Over the last week, according to our Google Analytics, one of our top 50 destinations is Gatlinburg, Tennessee. So lets say you are looking for Gatlinburg Hotels, and you discover the MountainLoft which has some pretty good reviews at TripAdvisor, Travelocity, Orbitz, and Yahoo:

If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you see the Plan-It widget:

The Plan-It Widget pops you to a new page on TravelMuse that allows you to add it to a Trip Plan. The name of the hotel and the link have already been added:

Note that you don’t have to sign up to use this. That’s pretty slick. You just enter your email and TravelMuse will partially register you pending email confirmation. I already have an account, so I’ll log in and add it to a new trip plan. I repeated this process with some activities I found in UpTake, like the Gatlinburg Space Needle, Ripley’s Aquarium of the Smokies, Gatlinburg Guiness World of Records.

Once I’m at TravelMuse, I can add more information based on what I found in TravelMuse, to the TravelMuse Planner.

This is a partner friendly solution because the links in the TravelMuse planner go back to UpTake, where people can book their trip. Of course, in the process of exploring the editorialicious travel content of TravelMuse, you may find other hotels or activities to book!

This is just the beginning of our experiment in taking an open source approach toward travel innovation, and partnering with other visionary companies to solve the huge, complex problem of travel planning!

What other cool features does TravelMuse have?

This is what Jennifer Hwang of TravelMuse said:

• Original editorial content written by seasoned journalists and local experts
• Destination guides with more than 100,000 points of interest, plus stunning photography
• Inspiration Finder helps people discover and plan their best trips based upon their specific wants, needs and constraints
• TravelMuse Planner provides a centralized place to collect, organize and share travel research.

TravelMuse has done an exceptional job integrating Flickr Creative Commons licensed photos into their site. They also have nice destination guides for the top destinations.

Look forward to working even more closely with TravelMuse and other travel planning companies in the future.

I had a chance to meet with the Juha Huttunen and Leo Koivulehto when they came to the April Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. I was especially excited because they were from Finland. American competitiveness in the post-American world depends on our ability to attract foreign entrepreneurs like Juha and Leo to build successful businesses in the U.S. and/or targeting the U.S. market. So I’m excited about the progress they have made with TripSay .

We also shared our passion for travel and the different and complementary strategies that UpTake and TripSay are taking. At UpTake, we are a travel search solution focused on aggregating word-of-mouth across all travel communities out there, including TripAdvisor, Yahoo!, and TripSay. TripSay, on the other hand, is pioneering social travel tools to enable you to get filtered tips and recommendations from a network of passionate travelers and your friends.

TripSay is just getting started. Be forwarned that social travel “is about the people” so TripSay feels like a bar or club where you’ve arrived about an hour before the rest of the crowd is coming. So it will feel more full of life once more people sign up.

TripSay Groups is a nice way to get started if you don’t have many friends

The issue with new social sites is building up your network from your existing friend base or connecting with people with similar interests. Groups are a great way to get started if your friends haven’t adopted TripSay yet.

Examples of Groups

I joined the hiking, beachbums, and New York City groups.

Tips from the Group

Within the group, people can offer tips. You can also add tips to destinations and things to do when you add them to your profile. For interest-based groups, the tips are pretty spread out across geography. But for a destination specific group, like New York City, there is the potential for group members to share tips with each other with a focus on that destination.

Group News Feed

You can also see a group “news feed” that highlights what the group members are doing within the TripSay site. This is very Facebook-like in seeing what other people are doing. As people build relationships with other group members

Group Message Board

Groups also have a new message board where people can share ideas and ask questions.

Maps-Based Approach is Great for Discovery

TripSay also has a nice maps based approach that allows you to find other points of interest or destinations. Its graphically interesting and complementary to the search-based approach that we have taken. It is somewhat reminiscent of TripAdvisor’s well hidden map-view of products, but more community-driven, or new entrant PlanetEye .

Other Social Travel Sites

I confess I haven’t spent as much time looking at other Social Travel sites other than TripSay. But here is a list of some others that might have different strengths and good ideas.

• WAYN – Largest, most succesful social network for search
• TravBuddy – Well established travel social network with forums, blogs, community.
• Dopplr – social network of frequent travelers, share upcoming itineraries and trips
• RealTravel – travel blogging platform
• Tripwiser – focusing on road trips, people create itineraries, sort of like Yahoo Travel! Planner
• Tripwolf – New travel social network that just announced 10,000 users.
• YowTRIP – looking for investment; finding travel partners; experts, groups, good tips and good travel companions.
• Hereorthere – travel blogging site with community comments
• Driftr – photo oriented sharing site, create your itinerary, share phtos, tag items. Sort of like real Travel and yahoo! Planner
• TripTie – remixing travel itineraries. users share trip itneraries and then you can use that to create your own

Congrats again to TripSay! We wish them success in this new phase of their company!

I attended the travel bloggers meet-up at Blogher on Friday afternoon. The travel meet-up was originally discussed by Pam Mandel at nerdseyeview and on Blogher.  It was moderated by Suzanne Reisman at  cussandotherrants (who has also written a new book, Off the Beaten Subway Track, more on that later) The majority of our time was spent on introductions, but we did have a few moments to discuss how we could create a more tightly-knit travel blogger community.  Delicious Baby collected cards from everyone who is interested in building the community and will be posting the list of bloggers on her site.  I captured a few names during the introductions and subsequent discussion of some great travel blogs I want to add to my google reader in addition to the blogs already listed:

ms.adventuresinitaly

perceptivetravelblog.com

Jet Set Girls Blogspot–all about girls getaways

See Jane Fly–for the female road warrior

Mommy Poppins–telling us how to get more out of NY

TasteFood

Headed to Margaritaville

everyday adventures

What A Trip written by Nancy Brown, a contributor to Uptake

Mile High Mamas–(the Denver Post)

KitchenGadgetGirl (and consultant to Uptake) has an idea for creating a page with RSS feeds  from all the sites that wish to participate. I think this is the best idea yet, but I may be biased sine I have been working with her for nearly a year.

Uptake also have  a travel blog search widget we created in cooperation with the t-list to make it easier to find travel bloggers everywhere.  If you are interested in participating, please go here to join the search widget and here for information on the twitter t-list..

A few corporations sent some representatives including SeaWorld, DisneyWorld Orlando, Teleflora, and the Hilton were all there to gain insight into the travel blogger community.  They want to reach travel bloggers of all kinds (see Blogher, travel is big business….)

Many of the bloggers were interested in building a more cohesive community and wanted to make ourselves more available to other bloggers, publicists and corporations trying to reach us.  Please add to the conversation.  Give us your ideas to build a more connected travel community.  Next year, we hope Blogher ‘09 will have a panel devoted to travel.