Travel Industry

It’s always hard saying ‘adieu’ to a co-founder but it’s especially painful in this case for me to bid Elliott goodbye. I’ve known Elliott since we started as graduate students in 1994 (note to youngsters like Dennis Schaal and Kevin May – this was pre-world wide web in Boston. We jointly organized a Silicon Valley technology tour in spring of 1996 and visited young wannabes like Yahoo, General Magic and @home; still stalwarts like Intuit, HP and Wired as well as then-leaders like Sun and Silicon Graphics. Elliott and I caught the web bug on that tour and we bucked conventional wisdom in 1996 – and ignoring fat signing bonuses and salaries – we went off to co-found our first start-ups – Netcentives for Elliott and CitySearch SF for me. Loyalty Matrix followed Netcentives for Elliott, then a stint in Corporate America, running online marketing for Intuit Quickbooks.

For those of you that know Elliott, you know that he has three deep professional interests – start-ups, social media, and U.S.-China cross-border opportunities. We are going to miss him as he heads off to pursue new, yet-to-be-defined, start-up ideas that combine all three.

Tweeting on the Great Wall

I cannot imagine a photo that better captures the essence of what Elliott would like to do next – this is the Great Wall; and yes…that is Elliott tweeting the dude beside him…

Kaango logo

Relentless, always optimistic and ever the team player, Elliott did whatever it took to help launch Kango, then re-launch as UpTake after we discovered that our trademark lawyers hadn’t done their work like they should have. He found numerous creative and pragmatic ways to drive our consumer acquisition and team-building efforts forward, and his results are clear in the speed at which we reached 1 million visitors (<12 months after public beta), the success of the UpTake blog network, the launch of Travel Insights 100 and the complementary position he has helped us establish in online travel position

We’ll miss Elliott tremendously. He’s not disappearing of course (see his post on more details), he’s transitioning into an active advisory role and will continue to drive our social media strategy and initiatives (including TI100, the Blog Network and some TBD initiatives) with Pat.

Live long and prosper

It goes without saying we wish Elliott the very best and as we say in Chinese – live long and prosper!

Related Posts

Tnooz–Elliott Ng to leave UpTake for Ventures to be Named Later

Orbitz Blogger Day

By Whit Honea, Vacations Blog Editor

Orbitz Worldwide hosted their first annual Blogger’s Day early this week at their headquarters in the beautiful city of Chicago.

Orbitz was an incredibly gracious host and really went out of their way to ensure the comfort and enjoyment of all their guests, which included some of the biggest travel blogs on the web today (yes, even us!).

There are a lot of big things on the horizon for Orbitz and they were kind enough to share them with us, unfortunately they made us pinky swear not to cover all of it.  Something about swimming and cement shoes.

What we can discuss is the excitement and passion that is Orbitz and how it runs throughout the entire company.  They are generally giddy over the news regarding their change in Orbitz fee policy.  They are obsessed with hotels and customer service.  Technology drives them.  Also, coffee.

Barney Harford, the Orbitz President and CEO gave us a good portion of his day and he was happy to do so.  He even laughed at my jokes, which was probably forced and mere politeness, but I’ll take it.

In addition to Mr. Harford we were able to chat with Sam Fulton (Group Vice President, Retail), Chris Brown (VP, Product Strategy), Carolyne Crawford (Sr. Director, Customer Relations/Training), Roger Liew (VP, Technology), Julie Szudarek (VP, Strategy and Planning), Brian Hoyt (VP, Communications and Government Affairs), Eric Brodnax (VP/General Manager, The Away Network), Jan Lofgren (VP, Account Management and Development – Orbitz for Business), Chris Hills (Air Traffic Lead Team) and many others, including Kate who does a lot of the blogging and social media for Orbitz.

A special thanks, hence her own paragraph, goes to Marita Hudson Thomas, for everything.

Stay tuned to UpTake for more on Orbitz news and hovercrafts.

Sometimes start-ups fail because they can’t raise enough capital, but it’s usually because they either don’t execute or because demand and competition materializes (or doesn’t) differently than expected. Sometimes it’s because of an investor-management disconnect that leads to failure despite good execution.

As outsiders, we don’t know why PTG will soon be closing their doors.

We don’t have any proprietary or insider information, but we do think they have (we are always a little slow and too optimistic, so we’re going use present tense :

• a compelling vision of providing professional content (but not bookings) to help consumers who want unbiased help,
• an accomplished management team,
• a beautiful and easy-to-use site,
• unique content,
• and most important of all – traction on consumer acquisition.

According to Compete.com, PTG has more than twice the traffic of the much more well-known Tripit, Travelmuse or Nileguide. And the new professional review service that launched with much ado – oyster.com is just getting started.

According to Compete.com, PTG has twice the traffic of better known sites

So, with better growth than other travel start-ups of the 2007 vintage (unfair to compare oyster.com to those sites) and easily monetized hotel traffic, why is PTG shutting down? An attorney for PTG and it’s management team, Edmund Novotny, told Tomio Geron at VentureWire, “The impending shutdown of the company is a result of the economy…Everyone wants the company to succeed…Simple market forces forced it down.”

Why is Edmund Novotny involved? Because, according to Tomio Geron at VentureWire, some of the minority investors are suing the company’s management and Boston Ventures for $20 million, alleging fraud, negligent misrepresentation, breach of fiduciary duty and a number of other charges.

We clearly are not in a position to comment on the legal situation. We are surprised that given PTG’s growth, attractive market niche, and Peter Nicas’s (PTG’s CEO) accomplished past that PTG couldn’t raise more capital, but given the large number of travel start-ups fund-raising, perhaps it’s a sign of tough times ahead.

We want to congratulate Peter, Sheila and the rest of the PTG team on building a great product, and we are disappointed that PTG will not continue to address the needs of the consumer segments that want professional content.

BTW, I hope take a moment to see the site that the PTG team built, but if not, to save you a trip to what may soon be the internet archives:

Professional Travel Guide's beautiful home page

And a detail page, all sites can envy:

PTG's Miami shopping detail page for bookstores

They created an intuitive hotel page:

Professional Travel Guide's hotel well designed hotel page

Geron also confirmed with Nicas that PTG  ”is seeking a buyer and may shut down at the end of August.”  (Looks like they missed that deadline.) We hope they find that elusive buyer and the site continues to keep their doors wide open.

During the next few months, UpTake will be presenting short takes on travel with industry leaders, influencers and innovators. This post, written by Tom Romary, CEO & Founder of Yapta, first appeared on the Yapta blog.  In this article, Romary discusses the volatile nature of pricing and how the travel industry and Yapta specifically are addressing this issue for consumers.

Air & hotel prices yo-yo frequently

It’s no secret that airfare and hotel prices yo-yo up and down frequently.  A typical domestic flight will have 21 price changes over a 45 day period.  And the “high” vs. the “low” for the same seat on a flight varies by 400%.  Hotel rates change too (although less frequently, and within a tighter band).

The volatile nature of hotel and air prices leaves travelers wondering:  Did I miss out on a deal, or did I overpay?  Online travel shoppers today spend many hours visiting multiple sites scourging the web and getting their own price updates (according to Yen Lee at Uptake, over 21 website visits before buying a ticket).  And while the leading online travel search sites do an adequate job of helping you find a hotel or flight, they are delivering a static solution to shopping.  You do a search, and then you have a choice:  ”buy now” at the current spot market price, or leave.  Even after you’ve narrowed your choices to some specific flights and hotels, you are left wondering, “Will the price change?”  The odds are that your airfare will likely change, and possibly even within a few hours.

So if pricing is so dynamic, why are the big travel sites offering static solutions?

The business models for most travel search sites are finely tuned to maximize “conversion to transaction” now (not later).  They’d rather you not delay your purchasing decision in order to keep checking prices.

Value is more than a star rating

Value vs Price: One mistake many travel shopping sites make is assuming that the “cheapest alternative” is the travelers’ ultimate goal.  In most instances, their goal is really more about getting the “best value” (Value = Quality/Price).  Even the most savvy of travel shoppers are willing to pay a 3-star price to stay at the 4-star hotel.  They’ll also pay a little more for a non-stop on their preferred carrier, so those sites that are recommending a cheap ticket on a 2-stop are often not hitting the mark.  (For instance, I have 3 little kids under the age of 7, so when traveling with family, avoiding ANY layover is worth a little extra dough!).  But travelers want to make sure they aren’t overpaying on the specific flight or hotel they choose to stay in – and knowing that prices are volatile, this fear is always there.

So how can online travelers be assured of “best value” across a dynamic price environment?

As a personal travel assistant, Yapta.com helps travelers find hotels and flights, and then checks rates daily for you on those specific hotels and flights.  If the price goes down, you’ll know about it.  Your travel agent doesn’t do this for you.  Nor does any other travel website aside from Yapta.

(Value = Quality/Price)

To be fair, on the price “denominator” of the value equation, there are some travel sites that have made an effort to alleviate some of the fear and uncertainty around price volatility.  Nearly all major travel shopping sites offer some form of price alert functionality on a market level (e.g. SFO to JFK), but not on a flight specific or property specific level.  Additionally, they aren’t taking into account the “quality numerator” of the value equation.  So they don’t really solve the problem of “best value”. Most of these solutions actually commoditize air travel further by emphasizing only price.

Here’s a quick sample of some solutions that are worth comparing through the “static vs. dynamic” lens:

Farecast: For airfares, they make a prediction about whether they think the fare will go “up” or “down” in the next seven days (at a market level…not specific to a flight).  It’s a helpful tool, and by their internal study they are accurate at the 75% level (better than a 50% coin toss!).  In fact, it’s a good complement to Yapta.  The limitation is that it’s not flight specific so it doesn’t solve the “quality of flight” problem – and they don’t do predictions on hotels.

Orbitz: Offers a “deal detector” that tracks airfare in a given market pair.  You can name your price, and if any flight hits it, they’ll send you an alert.  Again, the limitation is that it doesn’t really filter for quality of the flight (e.g.your preferred carrier, non-stops only) – and it doesn’t track hotels.

Expedia: They have a download called “Fare Alerts”, however it’s really a trojan horse to kick off a search on Expedia, and not specific to any dates or whether I want a non-stop.

American Airlines: AA’s solution is best in breed among airline sites. Their Deal Finder gets to the date-specific/route-specific level.

Yapta tracks pricing for you.

Yapta: As your “personal travel assistant” Yapta aims to deliver value assurance.  While your sleeping, eating or going about your day, you can rest assured that your personal assistant will catch any decrease in the price of the flights or hotels you’re interested in purchasing and will alert you to the savings. Yapta will then connect you directly with the airline to buy it.   If the price drops again after you buy, Yapta will alert you if you’re eligible for a travel credit (net of any “re-booking fee” from the airline).

Given the very dynamic nature of pricing in travel, I believe that travel search as currently delivered in the industry is mostly a “static” (spot market) solution. A personal assistant brings a more dynamic approach to travel planning by constantly observing and notifying when prices change on specific flights and hotel properties — ultimately maximizing the value for the traveler, and providing an efficient method of driving bookings for the supplier. A dynamic personal assistant represents a compelling consumer opportunity within many e-commerce categories, and most certainly within the $200 Billion+ global online travel market.

Related Posts:

• Travel Metasearch is done
  
• Review of hotel review metasearch sites
• Evolution of Travel Metasearch
• What 20,000,000 Travel Opinions Tell Us
• How Kayak can beat Tripadvisor in the Hotel Review Market
• Travel metasearch isdone! Long live  travel metasearch

Orbitz cuts fees

Just a few weeks ago, Expedia announced they were cutting booking fees. Now, Orbitz just announced that it has eliminated its $7 per ticket air booking fee on single-carrier flights originating in North America (NA) and the Caribbean through 5/31 at its Orbitz.com and CheapTickets.com properties. This brings up two questions:

1. What does this mean to Kayak?

Kayak gets some of its revenue from suppliers but the majority of their revenue comes from Orbitz.  They are going to have to find other sources of revenue to make up the loss very quickly or institute some fast cost cutting measures.

2. Does this mean Orbitz’s other revenue streams are doing well?

Forbes wrote that for Orbitz  “the booking fees account for 10.0% of sales.” I assumed they were going to make up those sales through their other non-air profit centers (nyse: OWW).  But, in an AP wire feed, Stifel Nicolaus & Co. analyst George Askew estimated the loss of revenue to be approximately $12 millon.  In the same article, Chief Executive Barney Harford said, that Orbitz has implemented some stringent cost-cutting measures ($20 to $25 million) that provide enough operating flexibility to sacrifice that revenue.  Maybe a mix of non-air revenue and cost cutting can restore their bottom line?

These new cuts in booking fees save the consumer very little but are significant losse for the Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz.  How are each of these companies planning on regaining the lost revenue and how quickly can them make it happen?

Created by Elliott Ng

David Sifry, CEO/Founder of Offbeat Guides  is upbeat about the travel industry. He said, “because he just started, his business has nowhere to go but up.”  He calls this period of time the “new normal.”  This an interesting take from a successful entrepreneur.

About David L. Sifry – Founder and CEO
“Dave Sifry is a entrepreneur with over 20 years experience in the I.T industry.  Most recently, he founded Technorati, the largest blog search engine in the world, and was CEO from 2002-2007. He is Chairman of Technorati’s Board of Directors. Dave was a co-founder and the CTO of Sputnik. Prior to Sputnik, he was co-founder, CTO, and Vice President of Engineering at Linuxcare, Inc, having built Linuxcare’s services infrastructure. Dave is a recognized expert on leadership development, blogs and the massive changes in the digital media environment, Open Source development, and the Linux operating system. He is also the creator of Projectdocs, an online document management and collaboration service, and Hoosgot, a lazyweb service. He served on the founding Board of Directors of Linux International, the Advisory Board of the National White Collar Crime Center, and the Technical Advisory Board of the National Cybercrime Training Partnership for law enforcement. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University. Dave lived and worked in Kobe, Japan for Mitsubishi Electric, and speaks Japanese in a rusty kansai-ben. While he now lives in foggy San Francisco, one of his top travel destinations is Yosemite, in his hometown state of California, although the lure of London and Paris frequently beckons.”

Travelcom Related Posts:

• Kevin Fliess, TravelMuse, Video Interview
• Gregg Brockway, TripIt, Video Interview
  
• Travelcom 2009: TripAdvisor, “Going Here, There & Everywhere“
• Travelcom 2009 Keynote-”There’s No Room for Maybe”

Gregg Brockway, CEO of TripIt, discusses what keeps him awake at night in today’s economy with Elliott Ng, VP of Marketing at UpTake.com. He believes now is the time for a service like TripIt.com to emerge. His vision of interconnectivity between systems, easy integration, and tying information together across travel providers  is a vision that will clearly come to pass. The question is when.

About Gregg Brockway–Gregg is an online travel industry veteran, former co-founder of discount online travel company Hotwire and former president of Expedia’s luxury travel company Classic Vacations, Inc.  Prior to his work in the online travel industry, Gregg was a director at the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman and worked in the merchant banking group at Morgan Stanley & Company. Gregg received his MBA from Harvard Business School.

Travelcom Related Posts:

• Kevin Fliess, TravelMuse, Video Interview
• Sam Shank, Dealbase, Video Interview
  
• Travelcom, TripAdvisor, “Going Here, There & Everywhere“
• Travelcom Keynote-There’s No Room for Maybe

UpTake invited a group of industry leaders to participate in a series about the current and future state of metasearch in online travel.  This post was was contributed by Scott Hyden, President of STA Travel.

STA Travel serves a niche market that metasearch sites often underserve.

It goes without saying that the topic generating the most excitement in our business over the past few weeks relates to metasearch. It is certainly interesting, educational, and at times fun to watch the personalities we all know go back and forth with provocative commentary from their perspective. We all owe a collective ‘thank you’ to Kayak, Tripadvisor and UpTake for seeding a conversation that has added some spice to our normally boring and tranquil business. If nothing else, the topic drove more and more industry leaders to open a Twitter account (or to use their previously dormant one) to follow the action. To me, the commentary has accurately captured the slippery slope faced when a brand pays for user review content. However, the other parts of the discussions are internally focused trade-based arguments – I haven’t seen an end-customer comment included in any of the banter that shows they ‘want to see content aggregated from the most 3rd party websites’, or ‘need content from the semantic web to make their purchase decisions’. Of course consumers want comprehensive, unbiased content, but the mechanism used behind the scenes to pull the content is not what drives them to determine that the content is meaningful. They need it to be extremely relevant. If one site’s mechanism is better at doing that, then they have the advantage and that is how the conversation should be framed.

Opportunities exist to capitalize on student travelers' flexibilty

This brings me to my specific point – there are many niche markets out there that are not getting the most relevant content delivered to them. Selfishly, one of those niches is the student market. STA Travel has been in business for 30 years, developing products and services to serve the millions of students generally between the ages of 18-26 years old. Over this history we have shown airlines that we have the ability to move share and fill demand troughs, and as a result we receive unique products to offer to our customers. Speaking specifically to airfares, we can offer students deeply discounted prices, as well as additional flexibility for their tickets (longer maximum stays, cheaper changes, relaxed advance purchase requirements, etc.). While we have these great products, we have had limited success in working with most of the metasearch players for one critical reason – they can’t or won’t work with us to qualify the clicks we would receive.

Student travelers can help fill empty seats

While a couple of sites have worked with us to integrate our fares with content that clarifies our product as ‘for-students-only’, most of the bigger players have been unable or unwilling to do so. Sometimes this relates to the limitations of their user interface, but more often it seems to relate to their focus on other priorities. Whether our participation is in the core search results, in the path that allows the customer to click on a brand or brands and then opens browsers for each, or in a student-specific ‘channel’ tab, we feel the student customer of the metasearch site would benefit. At a time when price spreads across travel sites are shrinking, niche-specific unpublished fares such as ours do in fact provide substantial pricing differentiation. We just can’t justify participating when our clicks come from the likes of 38 year old lawyers who aren’t eligible for our products.

Perhaps the conversation will broaden.

Scott Hyden
President
STA Travel

Related Posts (guest contributor posts are in bold):

• A Brief-ish Thing About Metasearch in the UK. by Kevin May, Travolution
• Tripadvisor vs. Kayak Paid Reviews, by Dennis Schall, Travel Industry Media Expert
  
• How Kayak can beat Tripadvisor in the Hotel Review Market, by Sam Shank, Dealbase
  
• Travel Metasearch is done! Long Live TravelMetasearch! by Yen Lee, UpTake
  
• Travel Metasearch is done, by Yen Lee, UpTake
• Review of hotel review metasearch sites by Patricia Jenkins, UpTake
  
• Evolution of Travel Metasearch, by Yen Lee and Patricia Jenkins, UpTake
  
• What 20,000,000 Travel Opinions Tell Us by Gene McKenna, UpTake
  

Mark S. Mahaney, Citi’s Director of Internet Research, wrote an excellent summary of Expedia’s rebound and brighter prospects since eliminating the booking fee. A couple of his key points:

1. Cutting the booking fee will cost Expedia about 10% of their profits, but will stop market share losses against Priceline and suppliers, while likely taking share away from Orbitz (where booking fees make up ~60% of profits) and Travelocity if those two agencies don’t match or continue to match Expedia’s move.
2. Unlike other agencies, Expedia has a HUGE advertising/lead generation business in the TripAdvisor media group that generated $280M in revenue in 2008 with margins of ~60%. That constitutes 10% of Expedia’s revenue and 20% of their profit. In a recession, this media business is likely to do very well because suppliers will be looking to buy qualified leads to fill rooms and seats. Also the TripAdvisor team is expanding their offering to give suppliers more options.
3. Interestingly, Mark also points out that online agency share of online travel is stabilizing due to demographic and economic factors. In addition, travelers will continue to migrate their research and buying online (per PhoCusWright), and as a global agency, Expedia should benefit from both trends.

I think there is another important implication of the cut in booking fees and the global economic meltdown. Despite big investments and good progress by the other agencies, Expedia arguably still has the best hotel and packaging platforms. That enables Expedia to treat flights as a loss leader because they can cross-sell hotels or use their market share and packing technology to create great deals for travelers while protecting supplier brands. Expedia’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, said as much at the Goldman Sach’s Internet conference (yes, I know I’m mixing banks now – I think that’s a faux pas of some kind) when he said that leisure travel was the only short term option to drive growth, consumers were responding to price reductions, and that Expedia expected ADRs (average daily room rates) to go down – but that Expedia expects to gain hotel share.

Travel ‘happy meals’-- would you like milk or fries with that flight, hotel or car rental?

Hard to argue with the short term results from the financial markets – Expedia stock is up ~$3 to ~$9.5.

The market likes Expedia's elimination of booking fees

It will be interesting to see the longer term implications. Will Expedia force Orbitz into a merger with Travelocity – does Expedia benefit from that? Sure the combined entity will have significant cost savings but it will likely be burdened with debt and integrating two global platforms will likely keep both sides internally focused. Time will tell, but congratulations to Dara & the Expedia team – the booking fee cut was a bold move to take the initiative back.

Related posts:
Expedia’s Booking Fees: The Trigger Point

Travel Metasearch is done! Long live Travel Metasearch!

Our bloggers are fearless in expressing their opinions. They are adept at using their computer pens to skewer if needed. I wondered what they would say about the UpTake Blog Network launch (I asked for a post, if they could). They were honest and funny and wonderful. Read on to laugh, gasp and meet our bloggers.

THE VACATION BLOGGERS

Mr.BigDubya

Because I Get Paid That’s Why

“Some of you might know my lead editor who is rumored to have handed Elvis his final peanut butter and banana sandwich on that fateful day in August 1977. Whit leads a collection of miscreants bloggers who provide their insight and expertise (bwahaha – I almost wrote that with a straight face – expertise? I go someplace. I write about it. You read it. I get paid.) into some great vacation spots and destinations you might find interesting and, dare I say, compelling.

So, take some time and head over there today. See who’s providing some of the most cutting-edge and entertaining travel information on the web. Expedia? Hacks. Travelocity? Yeah, go ahead, roam with the gnome. UpTake, my friends. UpTake.”

Honea Express

Quick on the UpTake and Why I Can’t Wear Business Socks

“Today UpTake has launched its official press release which is more or less a tribute to me and some fine print. At least that’s the way my mom will read it.

Please check it out, and if you haven’t done so add us to your RSS. Yes, it’s a travel blog, but I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the tales we weave- especially in the next few weeks. There will be action, sex and adventure! Imagine if Indiana Jones had a blog instead of a hat. Yes, it’s that good.

Miss. Britt

Please Do Not Punch A Baby

“Yesterday, I got an email from one of my editors telling me to prepare myself for official and real and actual rock star status. Something about “releasing to the world” and “featured” and blah blah blah. I didn’t bother with the details because I had plans to make. But I got the point. Today was going to be A Big Deal Day.

I received an email this morning asking if the paparazzi was camped out yet. I peeked through my curtains and confirmed that no, not yet, apparently my celebrity status was still just a drunken inside joke.”

Luke, I am Your Father

In Case You Missed It On CNN

“Perhaps more interesting, will be the official About Us page for the entire team of bloggers currently writing for UpTake Vacations. They are a talented group of writers, so I encourage you to read all about them (and me). You can also follow the embedded links, and thus be rewarded with hours of extended reading pleasure. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll secretly curse us because you won’t get anything else done.

Clare

V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N

“Check out the vacation blog when you’ve got a chance. And, if you haven’t already, add us to your feed reader. Even if you’ve got as little time to read more blogs as I do, at least you can check out some vacation pictures to get through the day.”

Zoe's Dad

What Price Fame

“The gig is great. I get to do stuff I would normally already be doing with my family like go the the zoo or the park or to Gallipolis. Then, I get to write about it over at UpTake and in return, I am promised fame and notoriety.

Tomorrow….

Each month I submit my travel vouchers, meal vouchers, admission receipts, gas charges, air fare and utility bills to UpTake. Whit looks them over and reminds me that none of that shit is covered to stop sending it to him.”

House of Prince

Some Places I Have Been

“We all have interesting lives, when we look at them from the outside. But only some of us like to broadcast about them all over the internet. Here’s to Uptake for giving me a vehicle with which to shout from the rooftops.”

i Vegas Family

Travel Blog Network Debuts

“I’ve had a blast writing for UpTake for the past couple of months…I’m covering the Las Vegas area for obvious reasons. I like to show that there is more to Southern Nevada than casinos, nightclubs, celebretards, hookers and blow. Although we all know that those things are appealing to a lot of people.”

Hey Joe

The Price of Fame

“Well today UpTake is running a post introducing yours truly (and a collection of other layabouts who are also trying to scrape together a few extra dollars by making up stuff reporting on some of their vacation adventures), so I encourage you to go check it out, and check out UpTake, and leave nice comments.’

LODGING

Nancy D. Brown What ATrip

Uptake Lodging Boggers Offer Best Insider Travel Tips

“It’s official, travel search and discovery engine Uptake.com is indeed the Little Engine That Could. The Palo Alto-based start up launched its new Travel Blog Network today and, drumroll please, I’m the Lodging Editor.

What’s in this for you? With our lodging blog, we hope to offer the best insider travel tips across the USA. All of the lodging bloggers have a journalism background, but we also LOVE to travel and share our tips with you.

ATTRACTIONS

Kitchen Gadget Girl

Uptake Blog Network My Day Job

“For the last 18 months, I have been working at UpTake, a travel search start-up in Palo Alto. I helped them establish their blog, and now I work as the Lead Editor for Attractions, writing about things-to-do around the Bay Area. I work with a bunch of great bloggers, including Linda of minnemom, Barbara of Hole in the Donut and Rhea of Texas Word Tangle.

Today, UpTake announces the official launch of the UpTake Travel Blog Network, and I invite you to stop by the Attractions blog on UpTake and share your thoughts on our take on the best places to hang out!”

ATTRACTIONS & BEACHES

Hole In The Donut

Writing  For The Uptake TravelBlog Network

“I provided them with a personal photo and a bio, which they then included in a major article about the launch of the network. I must admit that it is a bit unsettling to see my face plastered across the Internet – I really never expected that my writing would lead to me being promoted. But frankly, anything that provides me with a platform where I can write about travel and show off my photography makes me very happy!”

ATTRACTIONS, LODGING, & RESTAURANTS

Traveling Mamas Blogging At Uptakecom

“Can’t get enough of the Traveling Mamas? Check us out over at Uptake.com, where we’ve been providing content for Uptake’s Attractions, Lodging and Restaurants blog network over the past couple months.

It’s a really fun gig for us, not only because we’ve met some other knowledgeable travel bloggers, but we appreciate how Uptake’s search engine compiles reviews and data from trusted online travel sources like TripAdvisor, Fodor’s, Expedia and many, many other well-known sites.

RESTAURANTS

TripGrok

Tripgrok

“We have over 30+ bloggers and each blog has a unique voice. But, all of them encompass the qualities of UpTake as a site: expert, knowledgeable and refreshingly honest!”

That’s it from the bloggers for now. Read more from them by subscribing to our UpTake RSS feeds.  You can find the feeds at the top of the page.