UpTake, a travel search and discovery application, has announced the public beta launch of its site.

Published: 15 May 2008

UpTake, a travel search and discovery application, has announced the public beta launch of its site.

Formerly known as Kango, the vacation search site has amassed the travel industry's largest database of hotels and attractions and analysed more than 20 million online opinions from other travelers. It brings content from thousands of trusted websites like Expedia, Fodors, goCityKids, Travelocity, Virtual Tourist, and Yahoo! Travel, offering more than 400,000 US hotels and attractions.

UpTake was developed to be complementary to existing travel sites. Like Google, it only provides a relevant abstract of the information and then offers a direct link to the site to find additional information.

"Unlike other travel sites, we are focused on delivering the most comprehensive coverage," said founder and president Yen Lee, former general manager of Yahoo! Travel.

"We offer the broadest and deepest information about US hotels and we'll be developing similar levels of coverage for other lodging and destinations later this year," added Lee.

"It's easy to make poor vacation planning decisions, especially if you're going somewhere for the first time," said Lee. "Bad travel decisions are painful because your vacation time is so scarce. Our goal is to deliver relevant travel information from across the web, to help you avoid decisions that leave you feeling dissatisfied with your vacation."

UpTake provides tailored recommendations based on analysis of more than 20 million travel reviews, ratings, and opinions from over a thousand websites.

"When you know where and when you want to travel, existing travel booking sites excel. But today's booking sites don't help you shop based on why you are traveling or who you are traveling with. UpTake is designed to give you better recommendations based on these fundamental questions of who and why," said Lee.

"UpTake matches a traveler with the most useful reviews, photos, etc. for the most relevant hotels and activities through attribute and sentiment analysis of reviews and other text, analysis guided by our travel ontology to extract weighted meta-tags. More simply, we break apart and analyse reviews and articles so we can recommend the best products for you," he said.