Following through on its announcement earlier this year, Expedia is planning to spin off TripAdvisor later this month and began filing presentations today with the Securities & Exchange Commission that outline its growth prospects sans the popular hotel review site. So what’s in store for Expedia going forward? Read more: AllThingsD, Tnooz

Just in time for the holidays—and holiday travel—TripIt is now available for download on the Kindle Fire from the Amazon Appstore for Android. A recent survey conducted by the travel-planning company found that more than 40 percent of its users owned a Kindle. In additional TripIt news, the company now recognizes Global Videoconferenceing Network appointments. Read more: Tnooz

Social travel site Gogobot today unveiled a new app that integrates Flipboard, a social magazine application, enabling users to take a real-time stream of travel photos and experiences from across the globe and turn them into postcards that can be culled into a sort of DIY digital travel magazine. The app is available for iPhone, iPad and iTouch. Users can find Gogobot in the “Travel” section of Flipboard. Read more: Sacramento Bee (press release)

If you missed the news about Alec Baldwin being escorted off an American Airlines plane on Dec. 6 for bad passenger behavior—namely not abandoning his Words With Friends game and shutting down his electronic device when told and storming into the lavatory—then, well, you missed it. Good for you that you spend time on more important things besides celebrity gossip. But if you need a recap or want to know an update on the situation, check out The Washington Post. Seems Baldwin has ticked off Greyhound too (from CNN).

Other travel news/roundups of note:

Air Ticket Sales by U.S. Travel Agents are 6 Percent Ahead of Year-Over-Year (MarketWatch/press release)
Merger Planned Between Travel-Focused Ad Agencies: MMG Worldwide and Y Partnership (New York Times)
Free Airport Wi-Fi for Nintendo 3DS Users From Boingo Wireless (Gadling)
Top Travel News of 2011 (Budget Travel)
9 Essentials for Traveling With Tots (Today Travel)

Photo: Expedia

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TravelTechnology Weekly — Expedia/TA Split, Rebooting Travel…
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Avis First Car Rental Company to Partner With TripIt

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.

The recently merged carriers United and Continental Airlines announced new changes this week to customer services and products, in a move that paves the way for a single brand to emerge in the near future.

The biggest shift is added functionality on both brands’ websites—united.com and continental.com—allowing customers to shop for flights, obtain seat assignments and check flight status for both carriers on both sites. Passengers also can check-in and print boarding passes from either carrier’s kiosks in hub cities including Chicago, New York/Newark, Houston and San Francisco.

The joint company, United Continental Holdings, also has introduced Premier Access, a new package of priority airport services, including designated check-in counters, priority security screening, “front of the line” boarding through special Premier Access lanes, and priority baggage handling for elite-level frequent flyers and premium-cabin customers. The elite-service rebranding will be rolled out at airports over the next several months. Until then, elite-level frequent flyers and customers traveling in first, business and business-first cabins have access to United’s current premium/elite benefits.

Other consistency changes being made over the next several months include:

- aligned check-in and boarding processes across both carriers.
- free Wi-Fi and the same beverage choices in airport lounges.
- new “Choice Menu” in-flight food options, with the same choices and pricing for both carriers.
- aligned customer policies, procedures and fees.
- new signage and branding.
- single social media channels—@United for Twitter, and a new Facebook page.

Photo credit: United Continental Holdings

Related post:
$3.2B United Continental Merger Creates World’s Largest Airline

Last Sunday, China banned smoking in most public spaces, including airports, train stations, restaurants—and hotels. Basically, any enclosed public space where people congregate (though offices and factories are oddly exempt), it’s now illegal to light up. The country has about 300 million smokers, and, according to the World Health Organization, more than a million die each year from smoking-related diseases.

Still, the impact of the new law is not expected to be dramatic, given that the government doesn’t plan to penalize violators. According to The Telegraph, the genesis of the ban is the World Health Organization’s reprimand of China for refusing to comply with a global anti-tobacco treaty. There is also broad concern for non-smokers who are exposed to secondhand smoke on a daily basis.

The hotel industry in general is downplaying the news. Almost all hotel properties in major cities offer non-smoking rooms, and many have long restricted lighting up to outdoor or ventilated areas, as smoking in rooms increases cleaning and maintenance costs.

Carlos Chen, director of sales at the Guoman Hotel in Shanghai, says most of his guests are accustomed to the rule. “Even our smoking guests frequently travel to countries where smoking has been banned in public places for several years,” says Chen. “I don’t think the new law in China will impact our business very much.”

Major hotel properties in Thailand, Singapore and Mumbai are implementing smoking bans in anticipation of more restrictive laws in the coming months.

Photo: Ivan Walsh, via Flickr