Uptake Sets Social Travel Bar Sky High; Launches Discovery and Recommendation Engine Powered by Your Friend Graph

MENLO PARK, CA--(Marketwire - Nov 9, 2011) - Today, Uptake launched Travel Q&A, a new social travel service that uses the latest in web technology to help consumers create their ideal vacation with trusted recommendations from their Facebook friends and the most relevant information from across the web.

Using its patent-pending "Destination Mining" technology, Uptake's new Travel Q&A gathers information from users' Facebook friends to create a personalized social travel experience. This new service analyzes both friends' explicit location data, such as hometowns and check-ins, as well as friends' less-obvious, implicit location data, which contains nearly 70% of friends' destinations in the form of photos, status updates and comments.

In the past three years, Uptake has become one of the most visited search and discovery travel sites in the world, with four million unique visitors per month. Uptake has also amassed and categorized the largest library of vacation experiences in the U.S., with more than 1.8 million destination ideas, hotels, restaurants, activities and attractions. With its new Travel Q&A service, Uptake is poised to become the leader in social travel and fundamentally change how consumers plan and make the most of every journey.

Travel Q&A enables travelers to:

• Identify friends within their Facebook network who have been to a particular destination, tapping into both explicit and implicit Facebook data;
• Browse, select and ask specific friends about destinations and activities; and
• Organize the advice they receive.

Travel Q&A eliminates undirected wall posts and unanswered questions common to many other online social services. Instead this new service provides a direct line to friends who know the destination best, and can provide the most valuable insight to the traveler.

"We've designed the new Uptake to reflect natural travel planning behavior. When people plan vacations, they pour over travel reviews and sift through star-ratings, but ultimately they prefer advice and recommendations from people they trust the most who have been to that destination before," said Yen Lee, President and co-founder of Uptake.com. "Travel Q&A does all the legwork for you, tapping deeper into your Facebook network to find friends who can help, and then facilitating that connection, eliminating this guess work and hassle. Moreover, this is the only social travel service that uses sentiment and attribute analysis technology to collect, organize, and harness information from 30,000 websites, as well as your friends' implicit Facebook travel histories to give you highly personalized recommendations."

To plan your ideal vacation and get personalized recommendations from your social network, visit Uptake.com.

About Uptake
Uptake helps travelers create their ideal vacation by giving them recommendations from friends who've been there and the largest online travel library. Founded in 2008 by some of the most experienced online travel executives in the world, Uptake analyzes and organizes users' travel histories, as well as travel information from more than 30,000 websites, to help them get the most trusted, accurate and personalized recommendations and information from friends and people who know. Based in the heart of Silicon Valley, Uptake has become the largest independent U.S. travel research site, helping more than 30 million travelers research and plan their ideal vacations in 2011.