UpTake is now featuring relevant excerpts from blogs from across the web alongside its 20 million travelers' reviews and 775,000 places to stay.

The new program, "Travel Gems from Bloggers", is the first of its kind, leveraging pingback technology to find, match and deliver bloggers' relevant travel stories directly to the page where a user is reviewing information about trip details.

Travel Gems is an aid to travelers and a boon for writers. Site visitors benefit from the personal recommendations found on relevant blog posts by seeing them in the context of their travel research on UpTake. This new resource helps travelers make more informed decisions about their trip, while bloggers benefit from reaching an entirely new audience and building traffic with these new readers.

World Hum, a Travel Channel website, is the premier content partner of the program. World Hum's travel stories are featured on pertinent pages throughout UpTake. Michael Yessis, coeditor-in-chief of World Hum said, "We're excited to be able to share some of our award-winning travel stories, and to help travelers discover new ways to see the world."

Yen Lee, president of UpTake said, "Through ‘Travel Gems,' UpTake merges two social media communities, travel review sites and blogging to improve the online trip planning experience. "Travel Gems" extends our mission of aggregating the most useful travel information to help consumers decide upon a better trip. Plus, it offers a new source of traffic to bloggers by sending our audience to their sites."

"Travel Gems" also features blog content from smaller, independent bloggers. While some are specifically travel writers, many others have a different primary focus – from parenting to food to sports. Their featured posts may include the inside scoop about a local restaurant, how to get a deal on tickets at a sporting venue, a favorite unknown beach, or the best playground in the neighborhood – all relevant and useful information for a traveler.

The curated posts featured on the site include the post title, blog name, a thumbnail image and a teaser excerpt from the blog, to help UpTake visitors determine if they want to read more.

Stephen A. Joyce has been working as a travel & tourism technology consultant since 1995. In 2005 Stephen and his company, Sentias Software Corp., began development on Rezgo.com, a next generation Web 2.0 tour and activity booking engine for SME travel suppliers and tour operators. In June of 2007, Rezgo.com was officially released and now boasts a user base of 900+ companies. Stephen is also very active in fostering tourism technology and is co-chair of the Board of Directors of the OpenTravel Alliance, a non-profit organization whose mandate is to develop and foster messaging standards for travel e-distribution.

http://tourismtechnology.rezgo.com