Well if you think Uptake is yet another travel site, then you are wrong. Uptake is a search for travel sites. There are tons of travel sites out there like TripAdvisor, Farecast, Travelocity, Expedia etc. So a normal user searches most of these sites to find the best deal and ends up wasting lot of time. What Uptake does is it searches most of these sites so that you don’t have to and finds the best deal for you. Like the site says “it searches 1000 travel websites and 20 Million Reviews”, which is a lot of content for a user.
Uptake is a semantic search engine for travel which makes it easier for the user to get more relevant results. It generates tags by searching various travel sites and their reviews of hotels, destinations, theme parks. By doing this it does not have to wait for the users to tag. With the use of semantic search, the ranking in Search Engines like Google, Yahoo will be higher and lot of results from Uptake will be shown for travel queries. The technology behind Uptake is really great where millions of reviews are indexed and arranged in a proper way and the embracing of semantics has helped them a lot.
It has options like “just get away, family vacation, romantic getaway, pet friendly, girl getaway” which search sites based on this consideration. If a user is searching for family vacations, the site looks for tags which are relevant with family vacations like kids, pool, shopping and kitchen and shows the result based on that. It also has maps attached to its pages to know the exact location of the destination you have chosen or planning to choose. Uptake also has a feature called “Things to do” for most of the destinations so that you are not clueless when you are travelling.
Uptake currently indexes only US Destinations which is a bad thing for a travel search site but I am sure they will add International Destinations too as they go along. With the competition in Internet travel Industry increasing day by day, they should add international destinations sooner than later. The other thing I am not very impressed with Uptake is their User Interface. Its User Interface is not very easy to use, Any website which is asking its users to scroll down to see the important content is doing a bad job. With the content this size they should arrange it better and should keep the main page clean, Instead of showing most of the destinations in the homepage. When Uptake adds International Destinations, the content would be way too much and they will have an uphill task of arranging it neatly and adding more languages to the website so that it becomes easier for International users. travel is not bounded by boundaries and Uptake has taken the first step to improve it.

If you are a fan of Barcelona, as I am, or if you plan to visit this wonderful city, then you must read this article.

First of all, I can give 5 reasons to visit Barcelona:

1. The city architecture is a strange combination of old and modern, giving a special flair to this bimilennial city. Antonio Gaudi let many traces in his city, among them Sagrada Familia, Parc Guell, La Pedrera.

2.Shopping. Barcelona is a shopping paradise for everyone of you, no matter of higher standards you have. I bet! You can make shopping in big supermarkets, or in the narrow streets of the old city.

3.Football. Ever heard about C.F. Barcelona? About Eto’o, Cruyff, Deco and so many others big football players? About millions of socios from all over the world?

4. Dining in Barcelona is not expensive and very tasty. Try tapas, paella and other products of the famous spanish kitchen!

5. Museums and culture. There are 55 museums in this city, and everyone of them worths a few hours visit!

Barcelona is a spanish city, located on the Mediteranean Sea, on the mouths of the rivers Llobregat and Besos. It is Catalunya’s most populuos city, and one of the most dynamic european cities. It contains a rich cultural heritage, which made the city to be promoted as a UNESCO world heritage Site.

Barcelona is usually a destination for a city break or for a long week end. Because you will come again, I can assure you!

I was impressed in Barcelona by Sagrada Familia, the masterpiece of Antonio Gaudi, a genial architect of the XIXth century.  Its delicate , but strong lines, and long searched proportions are a pleasure for any eye!

Barcelona and the neighborhood means also sea, beaches, swimming. But you should observe, as I did, that beaches of Barcelona are not very stable and are very criticized by the environmental organizations.

Don’t waste time anymore, go and see Barcelona!

Burma is a nice land in South East Asia, bordering with China, India and the ocean. It was until 1949 a british colony.

Worse than that, it is ruled since 40 years by a military dictatorship. The neighboring India, the biggest world’s democracy, keeps the eyes shut on the human rights violation, as it it is very interested in controlling the Burma oil reserves.

The worsest: a devastating cyclone, called Nagis, hit Burma and caused 100 000 human victims. Other 2 000 000 people lost their houses and live on the streets. There is a dramatic lack of drinking water and basic food, consisting the major risk of outbreaking epidemies as cholera, hepatitis and typhoydis. And the military government did not allow to the foreign aids to enter the country, which is not easy to understand.

In order to help Burma, I would have the following suggestions:

1. Stay away from Burma(Myanmar) for a few weeks, unless you are an international expert.

2.Speak about this disaster to your friends and relatives, and hold on the S.O.S.

3. Spend something for Burma through checked reliable channels.

Hello Sebastian, can you tell some information about you and the Tripwolf team?

I am originally from Vienna, Austria, but I have been living in New York for 2 years. I’m 30 years old and a passionate traveler: I have visited 70 countries. For the last few years I worked as a journalist and international correspondent for Austrian and German print magazines, covering stories like the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, the youth scene in Teheran, the hunt for war criminal General Mladic in Serbia or the working conditions in Brazil’s sugar industry.

I am running the company together with my best friend Alexander Trieb who is based in Manhattan. He has lots of start-up experience, both from the US and Europe and he worked in IT and management consulting before we started tripwolf.

At the moment the tripwolf team consists of 10 - 12 people, based in New York, Vienna, Budapest and San Francisco.

Can you tell us when did the Tripwolf project started?

The project was started in early summer last year - exactly one year ago.

If it’s not a secret, can you disclose the budget for the entire project?

I would prefer not to disclose the funding. We will announce one investor soon, and we are looking for a further round of investment.

Any story regarding the name of the site? Was it just a flash or did something else inspired you?

The wolf has a few associations that we like: wolves are social animals which reflects the community aspect. but there is also the association with individual travel -the “lonely wolf” that travels over long distances. (apart from that the name is easily understandable also for non-english speakers.)

What are your goals with Tripwolf?

Our vision is to become the leading European web 2.0 travel guide, both for tourist going INTO Europe as well as those going OUT OF Europe. We are focusing on German and English speaking markets first. We will also launch versions in Spanish and later in French and Italian (we have a lot of content in these languages already).

Can you tell more about the features that distinguish Tripwolf from the rest of travel social networks?

What makes tripwolf really unique is the integration with exisiting social networks - which makes it really easy for users to join and to get benefits like personal travel recommendations. You can import your Facebook profile and your Facebook friends, and after public launch you will also be able to log in with your Facebook account. The integration of other social networks will follow. The idea behind it: People won’t go to a travel website every day, but it should be easy for them to reach it through the sites they use a lot.

How do you see the travel industry in five years?

I think the dominant thing in five years will be time travel. no, just kidding…
Honestly, I think the trend to social networking is here to stay, especially in travel. People don’t have much holidays, and travel is expensive, so people want really good recommendations because they don’t want to be disappointed. And surveys show that more than. 70% of people get information from friends & family before they decide where they travel. that’s somehting that we reflect on tripwolf: you don’t get recommendations from a mass of users you don’t know (or from one travel guide book writer, for that matter), but from your own trusted sources.
I think online travel agents (from expedia downwards) will have a very tough time over the next few years. It’s hard for them to build up a credible and trusted community, and they can only compete over price. At the same time, customized, tailored offers for individual travelers will become more important.

What are your tastes for:

travel destination
Wherever I haven’t been yet. Next stops on my wishlist: Shanghai, Buenos Aires, Laos

Hotels
Anything goes as long as it’s clean (no cockroaches!) and the mattresses aren’t too soft.

What’s the weirdest thing that happened to you on a trip?

wow, I could fill books with that. one particularly interesting experience was nearly getting killed by 20,000 rock fans at a concert in Mexico City. For some reason they didn’t like me - weird crowd dynamics.

This is the first interview on journeyetc and more are likely to appear soon, if you have any suggestions for persons I can take an interview from or questions I can ask, please use the email from the contact page.

Tripwolf is a trip planner and social travel guide. Website is still in private beta phase, so if you are one among those who have been allowed to use it, congrats! Others can enter their name and email-id in Tripwolf and hope someone from TripWolf will send you an invite, or use this one.

TripWolf has a very nice design and easy to use interface. As for me, it did not take me more than 30 seconds to understand what does this site do and how to use it. My grandmother might take 60 seconds maximum to start using this site. It has a very useful drag and drop feature where you can drag the places you want to visit and drop it into your scrapbook, from where you can create a pdf guide and download it onto your computer. The downloaded pdf has all the necessary information about the places you want to visit. Let me give you an example, I created a pdf guide for Cairo, Egypt. It had all the information I wanted to know as a traveller if I wanted to visit Cairo like places to visit, shopping, nightlife, restaurants, accommodation and many more. This is helpful for travelers who can just add the pdf to their mobile phones and read it when they are travelling even without having internet access to visit the website.

Now to the socializing part of the website, You and your friends can recommend each other the places to visit and also share pictures in the gallery. So you can plan your trip based on the recommendation from your friends but just recommending a place is not good enough reason to go on a trip. So to make things easier for you in Tripwolf, there are Trip Gurus (these are the people who have already visited or stay in a place, you plan to visit). Trip Gurus are really friendly and help you out with most of your questions. If you are lucky enough, they might even join you on your trip or they might help you meet the locals who might help you out. As you visit more places and when you are sure you can help out other users with their trip plans, you can become a Trip Guru too.

After you have planned your trip and visited amazing cities, I hope you had a nice trip. You can add the place in the website if it is not already available, you can write a journal about the trip, upload photos and share it with your friends. The best part about this website is its wiki like editing, where most of the things can be edited by the users. So the website has given majority of the power to its users to create and edit content. The website is available in 2 languages English and German, I am sure they will add more languages in the future.

I am sure you will have lot of fun in Tripwolf with your friends and family. As Tripwolf says be “hungry for travel“. Just keep travelling in between your busy life, there is nothing more important than exploring the World, it just gets better when you do it with your friends.

Others who wrote about it: TechCrunch, Travolution, Wandalust, Radaron

A few years ago a good friend of mine, a belgian expat living in Romania, used to visit his parents in Belgium via Athens! The reason is easy to guess: besides a visit in the greek islands, the flight offer from Athens was cheaper than from Romania! Low flights and low airfares were practically unknown from Bucharest, he only had expensive choices with prestige companies. Because of these facts, he ordered the airline tickets online and took the plane from Athens.

Meanwhile he can also fly cheap from Bucharest with no name companies, whose secrets are easy to guess and to unveil: less luxury and meals on board, cheaper planes, cheaper airports etc.

The differences are huge, more than three times! It means quite something for an addicted traveler like me, my friend and perhaps all of you. Unfortunately for the big companies, the cheap companies are also reliable and safe. But for the big companies remain the long range flights, there are no cheap alternatives for this market!

For environment aware people, there is also a mater of emissions: the flights are a major source for air pollution. And fortunately for the name companies the better the plane, the lower the emissions! There are already plans for banning the cheap flights on this reason!

No matter what is your choice, I wish a pleasant trip and a safe arrival!

Mexico City is the second megacity of our planet, after Tokyo. 25 millions people from Area metropolitana call Mexico City home. To make a comparation: all the scandinavian coutries put together reach not 25 millions people!

Mexico City is huge and is expanding daily and florishes. It is the country’s most important economic and financial hub, easy to imagine. It is also a megacity of contrasts:

-it is an expansive city, but you can also live on budget here;

-between all the megacities of our world,it is maybe the worst located megacity of our planet( a valley surrounded by mountains at 2300 m, which makes ventilation impossible)

-it is generally a safe place, but you should avoid Tepito, where drugs addicted and drug smuggler deal all day long. Especially if you don’t speak spanish, you can count with hard times

There are a lot of legends about Mexico City, which is also known as the City of Palaces and the City of Hope, and  many of these legends go deep in the history of Tenotchitlan, the aztec capital conquered by spaniards. Today on the place of Tenochitlan you can find the Zocalo(or La Playa de la Constitucion), which is one of the world’s biggest squares.

Which such a rich historical past and aztec remainings all over the city, it is obviously that Mexico City is a culture city. I liked very much that the aztec remainings are very well conservated and perfectly integrated in the modern Mexico City, the world’s fastest growing metropolis.

Mexico City hosted the Olympic Games in 1968 and World Football Championships in 1970 and 1998, as football is here very popular. Maybe you can still remember, the biggest stadium(also one of the world’s biggest) is Azteca !

I also loved very much in Mexico City a restaurant with spanish and mexican kitchen : La hacienda de los Morales. I enjoyed the mild weather, never too hot, never too cold. I liked the policeman from District Santa Fe which speak english. They are more efficient than NYPD and earn one third as the american do; consequently they are open to small pribes. I was glad to discover that “chille rellenos” is a tasty vegetarian dish, which can be found practically in every restaurant.

I did not like the air, which is not very clean, but is strong, due to altitude. When I arrived in Mexico City I suffered on the what is called “the mexican syndrom” :  breath difficulties, which  last only a few minutes! And I hated in Mexico City the neglected downtown, the heart of the city. This old center has aproximately 9 sqkm, and has ruined for a few decades. Nowadays it is involved in a sort of Renaissance, due to public  and private initiatives, mainly from Carlos Slim. You must have heard of him, it is one of the world’s richest men, and spent the childhood here, in the old centre. Now he tries to revigorate all the area.

Mexico City is an oval city which I loved! But is 60×40 km, impossible to meet all at once. I will come back for sure.

Nice picture of South of Manhattan, New York
View from the Empire State building