Hotel metasearch site UpTake is embarking on what it claims is a web-first to aggregate not only travel information from suppliers but also bloggers around the world.

Known as Travel Gems, UpTake’s system will feed relevant content from travel bloggers against search results using pingback technology developed by the company.

The programme will launch in conjunction with Travel Channel website World Hum as its first content provider.

UpTake president Yen Lee says the system will benefit users by giving them access to relevant editorial and also bloggers through exposure to a wider audience.

Blog content featured on the Gems site includes the post title, blog name, a thumbnail image and a excerpt from the blog, allowing UpTake visitors determine if they want to click through to the actual blog.

Although the system is being marketed as a consumer-driven initiative, clearly UpTake will benefit enormously from the SEO value of the pingback system it has created for use by bloggers.

Writers can automatically alert the UpTake engine to a relevant post on their blog by including a dedicated link.

A screening system will be used to prevent inappropriate content finding its way to search results on the main UpTake site.

Lee says:

“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.”

Last week Lee savaged search sites Google and Bing in a blog post following their appearance at the PhoCusWright@ITB event in Berlin, Germany.

Traxo, a trip planning and itinerary-managment website, integrated UpTake hotel, restaurant and attraction recommendations so they can be viewed on a Traxo trip details page alongside flights that consumers have booked.

At the same time, Traxo, which launched in August and competes with TripIt, TripCase and Kayak Trips, among others, redesigned its website and took a veiled poke at category leader TripIt.

Part of the new homepage branding reads: “Don’t trip over your trip details,” a likely reference to Traxo’s view that TripIt is clunky, in part because TripIt users must manually forward reservations confirmations and updates to TripIt to upload them into their itineraries. In contrast, Traxo users furnish Traxo with their supplier site user names and passwords and Traxo scrapes the supplier websites for travelers’ new bookings and updates.

Here’s the new Traxo homepage:

The redesign, with its tagline, “Traxo, Your Home Base for Travel,” and the additional messaging, “Automatically organize, manage and share your travel plans” and “Don’t trip over your trip details,”  is an attempt to reposition Traxo as more than an itinerary management and sharing service — which is how Traxo wants consumers to view its competitor, TripIt. Instead, Traxo wants its users to view Traxo as a broader service-provider that also helps with trip-planning, accessing previous itineraries, posting trip photos, playing on social networks and other services.

Hence the content integration with UpTake, which probes several thousand websites to help consumers come up with inspiring places to go based on their preferences. So, after consumers book their flights to Dallas, alongside their flight confirmation details on Traxo, they’ll now see hotels, attractions and restaurants that UpTake recommends for their trip. Consumers will get snippets of Uptake recommendations in their Traxo trip details page and click over to UpTake for the full low-down.

The Uptake integration into the Traxo trip details page looks like this:

Meanwhile, I asked Gregg Brockway, TripIt’s president and co-founder, about Traxo’s apparent jab at TripIt with the “Don’t trip over your trip details” line.

Brockway’s response was succinct and graphical. He sent me the following link to Compete, showing TripIt traffic in green and Traxo’s in blue.

Here’s the chart:

Elliott Ng, vp of marketing at trip-planning site UpTake, says he’s leaving the company on a full-time basis to pursue start-up passions related to “China and/or social media.”

Ng, a veteran of the technology-conference circuit and an indefatigable podcaster and tweeter on China and travel technology, says he will remain as an active advisor to UpTake, which is “in great shape.”

He says he doesn’t have specific plans to announce, but in the interim has put together, in stealth mode until now, Venture Sprout as a place to nurture some entrepreneurial and “unbloggable thoughts.”

The Away Network, which traces its roots to 1999, has been true all these years to its initial focus on destinations.

And, another advertising/media network, the TripAdvisor Media Network, found its footing during the same era with hotels as its core business.

It would be simplistic to attribute the relative performance of these two advertising networks to that one key decision for each. But we all know which focus turned out to be the more strategic one as the much-largerTripAdvisor leads parent company Expedia Inc.’s media efforts around the world.

Orbitz Worldwide doesn’t break out the financial performance of its Away Network. A spokesman simply says OWW is “happy with its business performance.”

So now, the Away Network plans to play a little catch-up with TripAdvisor.

Eric Brodnax, the general manager of the Away Network, was coy about the timing, but at a bloggers summit in Chicago last week that Orbitz Worldwide put together, he described some new directions.

Brodnax says the Away Network will bolster its hotel coverage, and part of that means it will add hotel reviews.

That fits nicely with Orbitz Worldwide’s current obsession with building its global hotel business.

If you take them at their word, Orbitz Worldwide employees appear to be dreaming hotels, eating hotels, smoking hotels, 24/7.

Meanwhile, Lodging.com, an Away Network brand brought out of the mothballs a few months ago, will expand beyond its current focus on facilitated search for hotels, with all of those online travel agency booking engines, and will enter the experiential or inspirational travel realm, combining travel information with real-time pricing, Brodnax says.

For example, Lodging.com will show families what travel options they have if they want to go on vacation to Cape Cod, Mass., with two children and a $2000 trip budget.

This new thrust for Lodging.com sets it apart from the usual online travel agency penchant for moving consumers headlong down the booking path.

For example, Orbitz Worldwide CEO Barney Harford says Orbitz focuses on presenting the best hotel content to consumers after they have chosen their destination.

In contrast, it appears that Lodging.com will get involved in the trip-research phase, and will help people pick destinations and activities before drilling down with pricing and other information about their hotel choices.

It appears to be low-hanging fruit (Orbitz, focusing on quick bookings) versus inspiration higher-up the tree (Lodging.com).

Of this next phase of Lodging.com’s evolution with technology partner Vast,  Brodnax says: “This is not going to be an easy technology project.”

Asked whether the new thrust for Lodging.com will have parallels with websites like UpTake and TravelMuse,  Brodnax says there will be some parallels with UpTake, although there will be some distinctions, too.

“A lot of us in this space have been thinking about similar questions,” Brodnax says, pointing out that some of the answers to those questions will vary.

After all, a decade ago TripAdvisor and Away.com asked themselves similar questions and came up with different answers.