UpTake Opened its Doors to the Public!

Most people have an idea of where they would like to travel, but not everyone know where to stay. Thanks to UpTake, you can search and find hotels anywhere in the US, read opinions from other travelers and discover what to do at your chosen destination.

Today, UpTake opened to the public by letting users come in without a password. UpTake president Yen Lee talks about what new features and enhancements you can expect and how he views the future of the company.

Erica Johansson: To what extent did your background at CitySearch San Francisco and Yahoo! Travel, help form UpTake?

Yen Lee: At CitySearch, we learned the intricacies of launching a start-up from the ground-up. We also saw that offering the right content in an easy-to-use, well-organized format can help people discover more about their own city.  The service also created an opportunity for marketing and promotion for all sizes & types of businesses.  But, we learned that travel-related businesses needed a lot more help then local related business, e.g. hotels or tourist attractions have very different support than the local plumber (who has the yellow pages).

At Yahoo! Travel, I realized there was still an untapped consumer need in travel that went beyond price comparison (e.g. SideStep) and booking (e.g. Expedia).  Travel search had to start addressing the more fundamental  question of who and why  you are taking a vacation-not just assuming you already know the when and where.  I also realized the explosion of reviews and blogs and the subsequent difficulty online travel planners had accessing and finding the right information for their trip was an untapped opportunity-thus the genesis of UpTake.

When did you decide to do a public beta launch?

We have been planning our public beta launch for months.  We wanted to launch with the travel industry’s largest database of U.S. hotels and activities and with the analysis of 20 million online opinions to give travelers’ a central resource to plan and decide on a trip.

What new features and enhancements can your visitors expect?

Since our private beta launch, we added some big-and some small-new features to improve travel planning and decision making. With us, you can:

• Uncover 20 million opinions from across the web – analyzed, ranked, sorted and parsed to make sure you just get the most relevant results -now the results are countrywide.
• Find a hotel anywhere in the U.S. -we went from only California and Hawaii to the entire country.
• Search just for travel naturally -our new home page will help you find the right vacation for you. We have covered the biggest segments of U.S. consumer travel – families, romance, pet-friendly and girls getaways.
• Check rates -with our cool new buttons you can select your favorite booking site
• Discover what to do as well. We have over 250,000 activities, attractions etc. in the U.S.

How do you view the future for UpTake?

Uptake is launching with the broadest and deepest information on U.S. hotels and we will be developing similar levels of coverage for activities and destinations later this year. Our goal is to help you find the travel information you need to make the most of your precious vacation time. But we feel like we are just getting started toward this goal. There is so much more to do from going global to covering events and restaurants etc. We’d welcome your feedback – please send us your suggestions and comments to feedback@uptake.com.

For more information about the launch, visit UpTake.com is now open to the public! at the Uptake blog.