There seems to be no slowing down in the desire for travel companies to launch (or reboot) applications for a population that’s increasingly tuned into mobile devices. Here’s a look a three new free travel apps—beyond the new JetBlue app we wrote about a few weeks ago—that recently have hit the market.

AFAR
The media company with the gorgeous glossy travel magazine that launched in late 2009 recently released an iPhone app with a focus around Highlights. These bits of travel inspiration include a photo, title, description and location of a recommended travel experience. The app launched with 4,000 Highlights, with more being added daily. There’s also a contest running through the end of March for users to upload their highlights for a chance to win a trip to India. AFAR says that a version for Android phones will be released soon. Now how about some wildlife photos to inspire me to go on an adventurous safari in Africa?

TravelZoo
One of the earliest travel deal sites on the Internet, TravelZoo has launched a mobile website and added an Android app to join its existing iPhone app offering (introduced in August 2011). Mobile users can quickly access TravelZoo’s traditional Top 20 weekly deals listing, Local Deals, Entertainment Deals, Travel Deals and Last Minute discounts, which is not a category found on the company’s main website. The Android app features local deals based on users’ detected location. According to Tnooz, 17.5 percent of traffic to TravelZoo.com was already coming from mobile devices.

Travelocity
Last-minute deals for travel bookings on mobile devices—especially for hotel rooms—are gaining in popularity. Travelocity already went after this market last year when it enhanced its iPhone app for same-day hotel deals and some local information. The company has now launched an iPad app that offers additional discounts for flights, hotels and rental cars at rates through the app that are better than what’s available on the Travelocity website. In addition, app users get daily mobile-only deals. They also can access their Travelocity accounts through the app, which can auto-fill in purchase information to speed the close of the transaction.

Photo: AFAR

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JetBlue Debuts iPhone App, New Web and Mobile Sites
Travelocity Upgrades iPhone App Based on Same-Day Hotel Bookings
There’s an App for What?

For all those who blame travel for their tendency to fall in and out of a healthy routine, Atlanta-based InterContinental Hotels Group is launching a new brand for the U.S. market that aims to eliminate that excuse.

IHG plans to announce the first EVEN Hotel location in the second quarter of 2012 and to open its doors in 2013. The new wellness-themed properties will see investment of $150 million over the next three years. Amenities at these hotels will include:

• Workout-ready guest rooms with features such as a coat rack that doubles as a pull-up bar
• Group exercise activities
• Equipment rental
• Free tips and travel fitness advice
• Menu emphasis on healthy options, with free mini-smoothies in addition to morning coffee
• Restrooms built for healthy rejuvenation, with natural lighting, LED dimmers, antibacterial wipes and hypoallergenic linens

EVEN hotels will be priced mid-scale, according to a report in HotelNewsNow, which also lists cities IHG is eyeing for development: San Francisco; Los Angeles; San Diego; Boston; New York; Washington, D.C.; Seattle; Minneapolis; and Austin, Texas. According to HotelNewsNow, IHG is aiming to open 100 properties over the next five years, and the first locations will be conversions of existing hotels with 100 to 200 rooms.

Photo: InterContinental Hotels Group

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Opening and Running a Hotel the IHG Way
IHG $1 Billion Re-branding of Holiday Inn Nears Completion

Uptake has been acquired by Groupon! We had been watching Groupon for some time, and admire how they created a powerful new business model, assembled a world-class team, helped consumers discover deals with increasingly tailored recommendations, and saw global, record-shattering growth along the way. Today, we’re delighted to announce that Uptake is now a part of Groupon.

Before we move on to this promising new opportunity with Groupon, we’d like to look back at what we’ve built and accomplished together – our tenacious and creative team, partners, blogger community, investors, advisers, and the 75+ million travelers that trusted our sites and recommendations so that they could enjoy amazing travel experiences.

Lasting more than four years, it’s been a phenomenal journey working hard to execute on our mission: to make it fun and easy for consumers to create and enjoy their ideal vacation. Our mission was rooted in the belief that consumers didn’t want to search for hours on end, but rather preferred a more thoughtful, interactive and personal way to discover and plan their travel – for example, to find the right hotel for the romantic escape or the best activities during their kid-friendly getaway.

Uptake was early to harness the Wisdom of the Crowd for online travel research and recommendations. Since the summer of 2008, Uptake has connected travelers with recommendations, driven by their preferences and intent, and drawn from the largest online travel library. En route, we developed patent-pending technology to aggregate, analyze and recommend reviews, articles and blogs from over 30,000 sites for activities, hotels and restaurants. And because travelers could discover recommendations based on their travel companies and preferences at Uptake.com, we became the third largest U.S. travel research site, behind only TripAdvisor and Yahoo! Travel.

In 2011, we discovered our technology also allowed us to uncover and organize the most valued source of recommendations – the Knowledge of your Friends. While reading reviews is helpful, whose opinions do you trust more than friends and family who have been there previously? While Facebook’s open graph initiative will structure your friends’ future travel history, Uptake was able to determine the past 8+ years of your friends’ travel histories to identify over a thousand destinations your friends have already been – without any additional work required!

All in all, we were able to combine the Wisdom of the Crowds and the Knowledge of your Friends – something no one else in the travel space has been able to cultivate to date.

Behind all of these amazing accomplishments was a stellar team of Crud-loving, problem-solving technology geeks who love travel, and travel junkies who love technology. Our new adventure at Groupon is possible thanks to the drive, energy and talent of the entire Uptake team.

We’re excited to jump in at Groupon right away – with our attention focused there, you may notice that some of Uptake’s features will slowly wind down. We hope you’ll use Groupon to continue to explore your city and fantastic places around the world.

We can’t thank you enough for all your support over the last four years! It’s been one heck-of-a ride.

All the best,
Gene & Yen

Tuesday, February 28th in the Year of the Dragon

Co-Founders Gene Mckenna and Yen Lee

What began as some bad YouTube publicity for American Airlines is growing into an employee-led drive for change in brand positioning and corporate leadership at the legacy carrier.

It started when Gailen David, under the username SkySteward, began posting videos to YouTube starring himself, dressed in frumpy corporate drag, as “The Aluminum Lady,” an AA executive with a panache for cost-cutting and a disdain for flight attendants. In one video, “The Aluminum Lady” plays with Fisher-Price dolls dressed in blue uniforms, saying, “We can run each one of these aircraft with about three less flight attendants. It looks like it’s perfectly doable.”

An American spokesperson made a public statement against the videos and reportedly called David in for a disciplinary meeting that he did not attend.

“We all have tried to deliver such great customer service,” David said in an interview with NBC Dallas-Ft. Worth. “And in return, it feels like we keep getting kicked in the gut, so this was a time for me to do something to make us all laugh for a change and really say what needed to be said.” He added: “They may fire me for it, and that’s going to be OK.”

To say something like that in today’s economy, you have to just not care whether you have a job, or have a plan and a passion for what you are doing.

It turns out that for David, it is the latter. This week, he launched a “sAAve American Airlines” petition through Change.org, appealing to U.S. Bankruptcy Court for “…a new flight plan with a new leadership team made up of individuals with a proven track record of winning rather than years of compounded failures.”

David is no rookie in the social media world. He runs a website, DearSkySteward.com, about the airline industry with a special focus on in-flight etiquette, and currently has 22,825 followers on Twitter. The petition currently has close to 3,300 signatures, far from its target of 250,000.

We will leave it for someone else to judge how much and what kind of change is needed at American, which is in Chapter 11. But this developing story is an example of how social media can work for or against a company. Media-savvy David, often interviewed in the national press, could just as easily use his platform to make his employer look good—in fact, it seems like he still might, if he sees some of the changes he hopes for at the airline.

Video: YouTube

Related posts:
American Airlines Bankruptcy—What it Means for Travelers
American Airlines Flight Attendants Plan Unusual Strike