I’m grateful for your feedback on my business name. We seem to concur that it’s really hard to come up with that perfect name, which exactly describes our business.

http://www.kangoojumps.com/

More examples of the confusion around the Kango name! :)

Thanks for your thoughts on this!

Naming is always a very difficult, subjective thing. And especially difficult in todays’ extremely crowded, global trademark and domain space.

We made the decision to change because there was the potential for brand confusion going forward with Kango - e.g. Kangol, Kango, Chaago, Kaango, etc. Surprisingly enough, there is virtually NO travel business named anything close to UpTake.

So our challenge is to inhabit the brand with meaning and imagery that creates a sense of “something” even though UpTake doesn’t really have a literal travel meaning. Within travel, we want to stand for connecting people to the word of mouth across the Web so they can make better travel decisions. So UpTake does tie to the “gathering up” of all this opinions and traveler wisdom.

All great points. I think that “Europe a la Carte” is a fine brand name and does strongly suggest “authentic”, “personal”, “unique”, “for the discriminating”, “only what you want”, etc. It does not connote the idea of budget travel, discounts, or deals. It also has the risk of feeling “exclusive” and not “off the beaten path,” which it seems is a big part of your brand. But there are so many other ways to build a brand–design of your site, tagline (of which you already have a great one), imagery, editorial voice–that I wouldn’t bother changing it at this point UNLESS you start focusing outside of Europe.

Anyway, thanks again for your thoughts!! Any advice you have for how we can make UpTake into a powerful travel brand is *very* welcome.

While I agree that a company has to make a name for itself by its actions a good, relevant name is important.

A company makes the name, not vice versa.