Okay, you’re not gonna believe this, but the next company that inspired me to write a blog post I learned later is also headed by a surfer! Swear I did not plan this… Hey, what can I say? Surfers are really into travel. Ken Leeder is his name, and he’s the CEO of the most Web-too-oh-ified travel company I’ve seen so far here, RealTravel. I had a chance to chat with his director of marketing, Christina Brzica yesterday. [It’s early morning Wednesday now, the last day of the conference.] RealTravel is a pretty cool site, and a very good-looking one, too — featuring travel blogs, recommendations, trip planning, forums, search by destination or tags (activities), travel deals, and more. Realtravel

Some of you may remember that RealTravel, headquartered in Los Altos, CA, actually launched at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Conference last year. They appear to have made some nice progress since then. Christina tells me they’re now approaching 2 million page views and 200,000 unique visitors per month. “Our number of contributors [as in user-generated content] is in the tens of thousands,” she said, “and we’re now measuring blog posts in the hundreds of thousands.”

The company does all this with only seven employees, which is pretty amazing. Talk about a great example of the latest Internet-startup credo, “Get big cheap,” huh? I also learned the firm’s chairman in Michael Tanne of social search site Wink.

Christina tells me that RealTravel just announced a partnership with SideStep (scroll down to see Press Releases), which will be noticeable on SideStep’s site in a couple of months. The firm has other partners as well, including Frommer’s.

In addition, last week RealTravel introduced a recommendation tool, whereby the site “interviews” you to learn about your interests and then suggests trips you’d like.

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