Palo Alto, CA based travel search site Uptake (www.uptake.com) just announced the launch of their public beta for U.S. hotels. Uptake’s travel database has built up well over 400,000 U.S. hotels and attractions, according to the press release.

Founded by Yen Lee, former general manager of Yahoo! Travel, UpTake (formerly known as Kango) brings together content from thousands of trusted web sites like Expedia, Fodors, goCityKids, Travelocity, Virtual Tourist, and Yahoo! Travel, offering more than 400,000 U.S. hotels and attractions. “Unlike other travel sites, we are focused on delivering the most comprehensive coverage,” said Lee. “We offer the broadest and deepest information about U.S. hotels and we’ll be developing similar levels of coverage for other lodging and destinations later this year.”

The difference between Uptake and other travel search sites, is that Uptake straddles the divide between aggregated content and human written reviews. What I mean is, a site which has human edited or written reviews cannot possibly have a vast footprint, and so they’ll be limited to specific locations, or areas. On the other hand, automatically aggregated content often provides a mish-mash of unrelated results. From my personal experience with Uptake (Kango), I can say that the results presented for each destination or hotel query are uncannily accurate inspite of not being a human written review. 

That’s likely because their results combine a database listing of hotels with a search technology that has the capability to sift through millions of user reviews on the web, compare the query with relevant results and then narrow the results down to those which match specific keywords. For instance, if you searched for ‘family hotels in San Francisco’, Uptake would only list those San Francisco hotels in it’s database for which users had posted reviews on sites like Yahoo! Travel and Virtual Tourist, which included the word ‘family’.

The point here is that this combines Uptake’s database listing of a specific hotel (which includes a lot of very specific information such as a map, address, a description of amenities, room rates, etc., which you won’t find in a user review) along with human opinions, or reviews of the hotel from across the web.

If all that sounds a tad bit difficult to digest, just think of Uptake as a opinionated travel search robot helper, which provides both information and opinion and allows you to make an informed choice. Kinda like R2-D2….For the record, I’m a contractor for Uptake (Kango), and the work I do for them includes whatever content you find on this blog.

Posted on May 14th, 2008 by PLing
Filed under: Travel News