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

HomeAway, Inc., is an Austin, Texas–based vacation rental company. Its website, HomeAway.com, serves as a marketplace for more than half a million vacation rental home listings all over the world. Earlier this month, that number rose with the acquisition of an Australian-based vacation rental company, signaling continued improvement for the vacation rental industry.

The site realholidays.com.au, which features 21,000 listings in Australia, was previously owned by REA Group, a Melbourne–based company specializing in online advertising for real estate websites. Before the acquisition, realholidays.com.au catered primarily to Australian travelers. Now that HomeAway has purchased the business, the new owners look to add Australian customers to its client lists and bring existing clients to Australian vacation homes.

In a statement released earlier this month, HomeAway CEO Brian Sharples said, “Australia is a tremendous travel marketplace, and HomeAway is excited to continue the work begun by REA Group to provide even greater choice to Australian travelers. We look forward to working with the realholidays.com.au customers to help them benefit from our technology and the marketing of their properties to a new, global market of vacation rental travelers.”

While the vacation rental market hasn’t recovered from the recent recession quite as quickly as the hotel market, possibly because of its focus on leisure travel, the industry has been cautiously optimistic about the outlook for 2011 and beyond. HomeAway’s recent expansion seems to indicate that business is, at least for one major player, picking up.

Related posts:
Vacation Rental Market Following in Hotel Footsteps, Almost
PhoCusWright Analyst Forum—Vacation Rentals Moving From Real Estate to Travel

Spartanburg, SC based Extended Stay Inc. finally exited a very messy and painful bankruptcy with the announcement of its $3.925 billion acquisition by an investment group consisting of Centerbridge Partners, Paulson & Co and Blackstone Real Estate Partners VI.

Extended Stay

The bankruptcy court had the herculean task of untangling the conflicting interests of the company, creditors, junior lenders, investors and bank lenders including Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Wachovia and Bear Stearns (represented by the Federal Reserve after Bear’s demise).

The whole saga was made even more sordid by multiple lawsuits between the company’s junior lenders and its bank lenders, and a court-sponsored investigation into the original $8 billion buyout and subsequent bankruptcy.

Blackstone’s association with Extended Stay goes all the way back to 2004, when it bought the company in a $3.13 billion deal. Blackstone then sold off Extended Stay to David Lichtenstein’s Lightstone Group LLC in June 2007 for $8 billion. It took just two years and the subprime mortgage crisis to force Extended Stay into bankruptcy in June 2009.

And now three years after selling it, Blackstone gets it back again for $3.9 billion. A spokesman for the investor group said in a statement that “After reducing its debt burden by nearly $5 billion, Extended Stay will have the flexibility to improve its customer experience and offerings.”

The only good thing about the whole mess was that it didn’t affect the operations of the 685 Extended Stay hotels which continue to operate without facing any closures or mass layoffs. It also highlights the fact that the problems of the last three years have nothing much to do with the hotel industry, and a lot to do with greed on Wall Street and in the real estate sector.

Gary DeLapp, president and CEO of HVM, L.L.C., the separately owned company that manages the hotels throughout the U.S. and Canada, said “I am particularly grateful to our associates, suppliers and travel partners for their support during this process, especially in light of the difficult circumstances in which we and the entire industry have been operating.”

He added that HVM would continue to manage the portfolio of 685 properties despite the change in ownership, and that the company’s near-term capital plan includes significant investment in major property improvements and renovations.

Photo – Ealden Escañan

Related posts:-

Federal Reserve Feeling Heat Over $900m Extended Stay Debt

On July 8, 2010, San Francisco, CA based social travel recommendations site Nextstop announced that it had been acquired by Facebook. Facebook intends to shut down Nextstop by September this year.

Facebook Nextstop

In a statement on their website, the Nextstop founders say that “What this means is that we’ll be joining Facebook and that Facebook has bought most of our assets… but we believe it’s an opportunity for some of the ideas behind nextstop to reach Facebook’s audience of more than 400 million users and have a much bigger impact on the world than we could on our own.”

Nextstop was officially launched in June 2009, and offers short user-posted recommendations of businesses and locations, along with photos, maps and other information. Nextstop’s search tool uses the 100,000 social recommendations it has in its database for showing results for over 1000 cities from around the world.

Since the site will be shutdown in September, Nextstop will be releasing its database of places and recommendations under a Creative Commons license over the next few weeks. Users who uploaded recommendations to Nextstop are being asked to export and save their contributions to Picasa or Google Maps.

Nextstop co-founders Adrian Graham and Carl Sjogreen are Google alumni. Graham helped launch Google Groups and Picasa, while Sjogreen was involved with Google Calendar.

This means that the acquisition has as much to do with the Nextstop Founders’ background with product launches at Google, as it has to do with social travel recommendations. It’s not even clear if they’ll be working on something similar to Nextstop at Facebook. According to Techcrunch, the Nextstop founders will be working as product managers at Facebook under Facebook’s product director Blake Ross.

Blake Ross himself is an acquisition hire who came with Parakey’s acquisition in 2007, as is Facebook CTO Bret Taylor who came with the Friendfeed acquisition last year and has 4 years of experience launching over 25 products for Google. 

In addition to Nextstop, Friendfeed and Parakey, recent Facebook acquisition hires include ShareGrove, Divvyshot and Octazen Solutions.