The best sources for trusted travel recommendations tend to be from those who know us best—our friends and family—combined with vetted research and content from select publications and websites. But gathering that information can involve several steps, and potential missteps.

Today, Uptake.com has re-launched its travel-resource site—the company’s new tagline is “Travel like you’ve been there before”—and introduced a new service, Travel Q&A, that aims to harness social networks, targeted user-generated content and travel resources to make the trip-research process easier and help users find the travel information that’s most relevant to their needs.

“We’ve designed the new Uptake to reflect natural travel-planning behavior. When people plan vacations, they pour over travel reviews and sift through star ratings, but ultimately they prefer advice and recommendations from people they trust the most who have been to that destination before,” said Yen Lee, president and co-founder of Uptake.com, and formerly of Yahoo! Travel.

Travel Q&A uses Uptake’s patent-pending “destination mining” technology to access users’ Facebook friends and analyze structured data (such as hometown, current city, college and check-ins) as well as unstructured data (status updates, photos and comments) in order to find individuals who are best suited to provide personalized travel recommendations on designated destinations.

Users can supplement their Travel Q&A answers with information found through two other key elements of the site: Uptake’s large travel library of vacation experiences, with more than 1.8 million destination ideas, hotels, restaurants, activities and attractions culled from 30,000 travel websites, and its significant body of users. Since launching about four years ago, Uptake has become one of the most-visited travel sites, with roughly four million unique visitors each month.

Here’s how the new tool works:

A user posts a question on Uptake, and provided they’ve allowed the site to access their Facebook account, Uptake then lists those friends who have content that match the destination queried about. Users have the option to select all who appear in those results, a designated few, or their entire friend list. Their travel question then posts to their friends’ walls—all through Uptake, without having to switch over to Facebook.

The benefit of using this service and not just posting the question to users’ walls is that it ensures friends see the question, with the added bonus that their friends also can see it and respond. At the same time, the query goes up on Uptake, where anyone can respond.

I tested the new tool by asking for London hotel and restaurant recommendations. Six of my Facebook friends were deemed a match. I know many more have been to London, but the information on Facebook is only as good as what gets posted, and not everyone completes their demographic fields, nor allows their information to be crawled. As a result, friends of mine who currently live in London did not show up as matches, and I couldn’t add them individually to the list of people that I wanted to ask without choosing to post on everyone’s walls.

Nonetheless, by querying just my six matches, I received four responses within a few minutes to two hours—three from my friends, one from someone who had seen the question on Uptake. I received email notices whenever someone responded, and I could easily get to my Travel Q&A page with a link on the right side of the Uptake homepage under Recent Activity. It should be noted, however, that replies from Facebook friends need to be posted using the application link in order for them to appear on the Uptake question page and for the user to receive notification.

Still, it’s great that you can quickly find a targeted group of friends who likely can provide valuable insight about destinations. Despite a few minor glitches—one friend commented that there was a hitch with the Facebook permission screen, and they never received a confirmation that their permissions were received—I have to say that compared to other travel research tools I’ve tried over the past few years (and there have been many—millions of venture-capital dollars have gone into building companies and tools hoping to capture the travel-planning market) Travel Q&A is one of the easiest to use, and it provided quick, relevant responses that I found valuable.

And I’m not just saying that because I work for the company. Those who know me know that I don’t hold back when I think something doesn’t work very well. Plus, those friends who answered my question separately commented that they thought the Travel Q&A tool looked interesting, and that they already recommended it to others. That’s a pretty good response.

Check out the new Travel Q&A for yourself at Uptake.com and let us know what you think.

You love travel. You love nature. You now have three days left to help determine the destinations that will make up the New 7 Wonders of Nature—until 11:11 a.m. GMT (6:11 a.m. EDT) on Nov. 11, 2011.

Finalist: Iguazu Falls, view from the Brazil side

The New 7 Wonders of Nature campaign was launched in 2007 by the Swiss-based New7Wonder organization after the success of its New Seven Wonders of the World contest, in which more than 100 million people around the world voted for what they deemed to be the seven most impressive modern sites on the planet.

The 28 finalists for the New 7 Wonders of Nature contest represent all continents except for Antarctica. The campaign started with 440 entries. After nearly 18 months of voting, only one national nominee per country plus multinational nominees were allowed to proceed to the next stage. After six months of voting for the 77 semifinalists, the New7Wonders’ panel of experts, under the leadership of Dr. Federico Mayor, former Director-General of UNESCO, chose the 28 finalists, which were announced on July 21, 2009.

The Grand Canyon is the site in the United States to make the list. The El Yunque forest in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, also is a finalist.

Floating is a breeze in the salty Dead Sea

Others making the cut to 28 range from popular places such as the Amazon River, Iguazu Falls on the boarder of Brazil and Argentina, the Dead Sea in Israel and Jordan, Halong Bay in Vietnam, and the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and Papua New Guinea, to more obscure sights (at least for typical travelers), like the mud volcanoes of Azerbaijan, the Sunderbans delta in Bangladesh and India, the Jeita Grotto in Lebanon, and Bu Tinah Island in the United Arab Emirates.

Over the years there have been multiple “seven wonders” contests held by various groups. Tourism boards for the destinations that make it into the finals tend to love these campaigns as they provide free marketing opportunities for them. Many have been going all out promoting voting for their nominees on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.

To vote online for up to seven of your favorite nature sites, visit new7wonders.com. For those who prefer to vote via phone, click here. Winners will be announced later in the day after voting ends on Nov. 11.

A catalyst behind the creation of New7Wonder was the fact that of the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, only one still exists—the Great Pyramid of Giza.) Following the nature contest, the next focus for the organization is cities.

Photos: D.M. Airoldi

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Fall Between Brazil and Argentina (Iguazu Falls)
Alhambra in Grenada, Spain — 7 Wonders of the World Runner-up
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It’s been quite a busy month for Sheila C. Johnson and her hospitality company.

Yesterday Salamander Hotels & Resorts announced that it has taken over management of Reunion Wyndham Grand Resort near Orlando in Kissimmee and Hammock Beach Resort in Palm Coast, and with its recently renovated Innisbrook Resort near Tampa in Palm Harbor, has united the three properties to form Grand Golf Resorts of Florida.

The new group of resorts offers 162 holes of golf designed by Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson and Larry Packard. Grand Golf Resorts of Florida also features the only resort-based ANNIKA Academy, an innovative teaching facility designed and developed by Annika Sorenstam, who attended the announcement event.

Salamander also unveiled what it has dubbed the Legends of Golf Trail, which essentially is the route between the resorts and across Florida, and plans to introduce a new Grand Membership program that includes club benefits for all three properties, beginning with the 2012 season.

In early October, the Virginia-based Salamander was selected to manage Sanctuary Cap Cana in the Dominican Republic. The $110 million, 176-suite property is in the process of being converted from an all-inclusive, couples-only resort to a traditional a la carte property, with plans to begin welcoming new guests and families in December. All current reservations are being honored during the transition.

The Sanctuary joins two other resorts in Salamander’s newly formed Grand Resorts at Cap Cana collection, which includes the Fishing Lodge Cap Cana, a 298-villa property currently scheduled to open on Nov. 3, and the Ocean Club Cap Cana, a 113-room boutique hotel, due to open in 2012. Managing Director Hendrick Santos, who spent 19 years with Hyatt Hotels Corporation, is overseeing the collection.

Salamander was launched in 2005 by Johnson, who was a founding partner of BET and who currently has ownership in three professional sports teams: the WNBA’s Washington Mystics, the NBA’s Washington Wizards and the NHL’s Washington Capitals. Additional properties in the company’s portfolio include the five-star Woodlands Inn near Charleston, S.C., and the Salamander Resort & Spa, a 340-acre equestrian-themed resort that will have 168 guest rooms and suites and a cooking school. The property is currently under construction and due to open in 2013 near Washington, D.C., in Middleburg, Virginia.

Photo: Fishing Lodge at Cap Cana/Salamander

Related post:
Best Golf Vacations in Florida

After initially balking, most hotel companies have come to embrace TripAdvisor and the user-generated content (UGC) model—well, maybe they don’t all embrace it, but most at least tolerate it. One major hotel company has gone a step further.

On Monday, Starwood Hotels & Resorts announced the launch of its own UGC system, where guests can post free-form reviews about properties as well as provide ratings on various individual elements, including overall stay, room comfort and cleanliness, facility expectations and whether staff met their needs.

The company claims to be the first major global hotel brand to establish online consumer reviews, and the move follows findings from a recent survey where nearly 85 percent of members of Starwood’s loyalty program, Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG), said they find value in consumer ratings and reviews on travel sites.

To find the new reviews, go to the home page of any of Starwood’s individual brands—Sheraton, Westin, St. Regis, W, Four Points, Le Meridien, The Luxury Collection, Aloft and Element—then click on the “Guest Reviews” link toward the bottom of the page, near the social media links. You’ll be taken to a landing page where you select a region, country and city, which then generates a list of Starwood hotels in that destination that you can choose from.

Viewers of the new Starwood reviews also can filter content to see the information that is most relevant to them, such as overall star rating, a reviewer’s purpose and frequency of travel, and their SPG level.

To write a review, SPG members can sign in; other guests need to provide the confirmation numbers of their stays, which had to have taken place within the 18 months prior to posting their write-ups. Reviews also can be shared through social media channels, including both personal and property Facebook pages and Twitter.

As noted in USA Today, Starwood will first check reviews for profanity before publishing and confirm the reviewer’s stay, but once a review has been confirmed, Starwood will publish it, whether it’s positive or negative.

A property has to receive at least five reviews before the ratings will be published. Of course, being that the program is brand new, there aren’t many reviews available yet. One of the first to reach the five-review threshold is the Sheraton Hua Hin Resort in Thailand. (Only three are viewable from the U.S. website as the other two are written in German.)

Reviews will remain on the sites indefinitely, and should someone wish to alter their review, they can’t change the original text, but they can comment on their original post, said Jennifer Leemann, a Starwood spokesperson.

I’m optimistic about the quality of the reviews that eventually will be generated on the Starwood properties, mainly because of the checks in place to ensure the postings are from actual guests and not competitors out to skew the ratings, which has been an issue for TripAdvisor, and that a reviewer has to have stayed at the property relatively recently.

SPG members will begin receiving notification of the new service this week, and those guests are the ones most likely to write the bulk of the first reviews.

Photo: Starwood

Related posts:
Starwood Creates Online World for Preferred Guests
Top Travel Brands Making Positive Use of Social Media
TripAdvisor Adds Airline Reviews to Search Results