VentureBeat

With so many online travel sites crowding the market, you’d think we were nearing a Web 2.0 travel bubble. But according to travel information search engine UpTake, which is launching May 14, there’s still an untapped niche in the market: a travel-opinions supersite.

The market is extremely fragmented with thousands of micro-sites for individual hotels, beaches, airlines and leisure activities. UpTake’s goal is to gather opinions from all of those sites together and become the most comprehensive research tool used by travelers.

“The booking sites are good when you know that you’re going to Maui on May 17 and want to stay in a Hilton Hotel. But if you don’t even know whether to go to Maui or Kauai, it’s not that easy,” said CEO Yen Lee, who was General Manager of Yahoo Travel before he left to start UpTake in late 2006.

The site features a personalized filter that, unlike traditional search engines, lets you customize your search according to profiles such as “kid friendly”, “beach”, “romantic” or “adventurous”. These keywords are matched againt a database of more than 20 million traveler opinions from more than 1,000 review sites across the web, including WAYN, TripSay, IgoUgo and, potentially, another newcomer by the name of Tripwolf (more on them later). The ratings collection now spans about half a million places to go, things to do and places to stay. The database will expand rapidly, according to Lee. Searches will be matched with search word ads displayed along with non-commercial search results.

A traveler with unclear travel plans visits, on average, 22 sites before booking a flight or hotel, according to a recent study by Google and Comscore. UpTake wants to turn these 22 jumps into one smooth stop. “We’re like Google, but we’ll only do travel”, said Lee. But he added that unlike Google , UpTake’s database is prepared to ask travellers the big questions: why they’re travelling and who they’re travelling with.

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Travel sites are in fashion this spring, with new sites adding at a steady pace. Finnish travel site TripSay is just the latest to emerge, for example, with ways to share tips about travel. It’s still in closed testing, but it plans to open to the public in a few months.

With hundreds of travel sites now existing — ranging from the big ones like Expedia to the small, single-author blogs dedicated to travel — how are they all going to make money?

Well, enter Travel Ad Network, TAN, which wants to help place ads at all these sites. It just raised $15 million from Rho Ventures, Village Ventures and individuals. The money will be used to increase advertising across travel websites. The company says it is serving 50 sites already. This could mean that some of these flavor-of-the-times sites may eventually make some money.

But being a traveler online is not always glamorous. While testing the basic features of TripSay, I was met with: “Cecilia has been to 5 places and is thus described as “Random tourist”. Next level at 10 ratings.”

Huh? It’s early days still for TripSay, so let’s cut it some slack. It works as a social community where as a member, you create and personalize your profile. You’re asked to list places you have been and rate them with a five-point smiley system. The ratings appear as icons on a world map. Only placing a few ratings will result in being dubbed the “Random tourist” — not a very admirable introduction for someone who has traveled the world. If you’re patient, and add a couple of hundred places, you’ll eventually earn a nickname like “Columbus.” However, quality of ratings might suffer if new users feel rushed to fill in information to avoid that initial rude description.
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As someone who has been home for one weekend of the past six, I know that traveling can be a real pain. While the Internet has eased some burdens such as scheduling and price hunting, it has also created new ones, such as organizing trip details when plans are often made across several sites. That is where a site like TripIt comes in.

There are a lot of online traveling sites such as Kayak (our coverage), but TripIt sets itself apart by organizing your travel information after you have scheduled it.

Using TripIt is as simple as forwarding the travel itinerary email that you get sent when you book a site online to the email address, plans@tripit.com. Assuming you’ve sent the email from an address you have registered to your TripIt account, the service will then build you a new itinerary within TripIt that adds several useful items such as weather information, access to maps of the area, pictures of the area from Flickr and other features. The great thing about forwarding these plans is that TripIt will take several different details such as a flight and hotel booked on separate sites, and place them together one one page.

“We have so many overlapping applications, and the next frontier is getting them to work better together,” says Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, one of the site’s investors.

The service also has social features that allow you to share plans with friends and find out when someone you know is near you on a trip. In this regard, TripIt is similar to a service like Dopplr, but TripIt has offers organizational tools far beyond that service.

The best feature of TripIt is the ease with which you can access all of your organized travel information on a mobile device. Printing out and organizing multiple sheets of paper for various reservations is a hassle. The recently launched TripIt Mobile eliminates that waste.

This latest $5.1 million series B round was led by Sabre Holdings, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and European Founders Fund. The San Francisco-based company previously raised $1 million last year from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (our coverage).

This new investment will be used to expand development, marketing and support for those users who have signed up with the service. Additionally, with the European Founders Fund on board, TripIt hopes to expand its service globally.

Dopplr, a Helsinki, Finland company that lets frequent travelers share their trips with friends and so that they make notes on each other’s itineraries, has raised an undisclosed amount of financing from individual investors.

Sharing travel plans isn’t new.  A plethora of sites offers ways to consult with others on travel plans, from MyTripbook, to RealTravel to Tripwiser. The difference is, most other travel sites offer trip-sharing as part of a much larger palette of offerings.

Dopplr does it with laser focus. The company has not launched yet, but is inviting people to test it. It is straight-forward and very simple. You sign up, and then are taken to a profile page where you can add your trips — it prompts you for your destinations and dates. You can add notes for each trip, and then invite others to see and correspond. Dan Gillmor, a former Mercury News columnist who has dabbled in several investments recently, is a co-founder, and invited us to share his travels. See a screenshot below.

I like the service’s simplicity. On the other hand, it’s clearly a service designed only for frequent fliers (the rest of us won’t need to use it).
It works well on the mobile number. You register your phone, and then you can SMS someone’s email address to Doppler’s London number +44 7797 806 170 to invite them to see your schedule (there’s no U.S. number, so it won’t work locally yet, but that’s coming).

Investors include Martin Varsavsky, Joichi Ito, Reid Hoffman and The Accelerator Group led by Saul Klein — all of whom use Dopplr, and are well-known for their investments in Internet companies (including Last.fm, Joost, Flickr, Stardoll, and Netvibes to name a few).