The bathtub is a traditionally private and intimate space; a cocoon enveloping your body. The MILO glass bathtub presents a stunning albeit unconventional adaptation of this space.
Via the discontinued Cribcandy
Month: April 2009
Quote of the Day (14): Welcome to our OOL
Welcome to our OOL There is no “P” in it and we like to keep that way
Vibeagent drops mask: Hotelicopter – I feel Fooled
In a Press Release dated April 9, 2009 Hotelicopter is presented as a “New” Totally Awesome Hotel Search Engine after “The Hotelicopter had attracted wide media coverage with its April Fools Prank”
Almost everybody in Bloggistan loves the way Hotelicopter was launched as an April Fools prank and then turns out as a hotel booking engine. “Good marketing” they say. I beg to differ.
Although I can appreciate a good joke or to be fooled and certainly can laugh about myself, I feel fooled by Vibe Agent in another way:
First the search engine is not at all new. Basically it is the same search engine as it was three days ago under the name VibeAgent.
Secondly I have been involved as a very active “beta tester” in the building of VibeAgent. I’ve posted two posts about it here and here and referred to it in many other posts.
I wrote:
It is meant to be a community that shares hotel reviews on the one hand and combines that with best price searching on the other hand.
The members are called Agents. They write the reviews. They are unpaid.
VibeAgent has teamed up with an impressive list of travel and hotel portals at the back end, like Price Line, Booking.com and many others.
So: It started out as a community driven hotel search engine. As a sort of mini Tripadvisor, but a bit more advanced. In the meantime Tripadvisor has overhauled its website entirely and became part of Expedia.
Now with this repackaging of the site as Hotelicopter VibeAgent has wiped away its entire own community.
Where are your approximately 5,000 plus Agents, Adam?
Was that part of the deal with TripAdvisor? You being able to show Tripadvisor reviews provided you did away with your own base of hotel reviews?
I’m not amused and I believe many with me.
Update April 9 16.00 hr (04.00PM) local time:
Again this is a matter of lack of communication: See the comments below. Feeling a bit better now.
Traveltwitterati: #travel #traveltuesday, #travelbytwitter, or #tbex? Zen?
1) Something is happening very fast and it is happening on Twitter again!
Sunday I asked around if anybody on Twitter had a hotel suggestion near Visp or Brig for a friend.
During a skiing holiday in Zermatt the wife of one of my friends became ill and was transported by helicopter from Zermatt to Visp were she was operated in the local hospital. My friend wanted a hotel for a couple of days in the neighborhood for her to be able to recover and to be nearer to the hospital than in Zermatt. Since he knows that we travel that area annually, he asked for some suggestions for a hotel.
I did some research with Booking, Tripadvisor and Vibeagent and based on their rankings came with the following suggestions:
- Hotel Ambassador in Brig
- Hotel de Londres in Brig
- The new Turm Hotel in Grächen, a little village around the corner in the narrow valley on the road to Zermatt and Saas Fee
Today my friend e-mailed me that he liked the Turm Hotel and the little village of Grächen and was anticipating the hospital release of his wife tomorrow.
In the meantime several of my Twitterfollowers gave me some ideas to look at. One of them @WouterBlok made up the hash tag #travelbytwitter.
2) Today all of a sudden the idea exploded more or less on twitter.
Wherivebeen suggested #traveltuesday and it was picked up by some traveltwitterati and caused an avalanche of travel suggestions. Am curious where this is heading.
Wherivebeen posted already a blogpost about it Where I’ve Been introduces #traveltuesday worth reading!
3) In the meantime
Since January we have seen growing #tbex the twitterchat channel for the ning based travel bloggers community Travel Blog Exchange from nothing to 634 members in a couple of months, also by way of Twitter. Check it out! they will organize a Travel Bloggers Conference in Chicago.
Things go fast in twitterland!
Will travelblogging been killed? I don’t think so, but Twitter is a powerful tool for new inspiration. That’s for sure.
BrandFreak: Segway realizing most people are lazy and just want to sit down
The Segway scooter was a cool idea, but it’s big downside was that people had to actually stand up on it—something fewer Americans are willing and/or able to do nowadays. This prototype of a new Segway vehicle, then, is much more promising. It’s the P.U.M.A. (Personal Urban Mobility & Accessibility) prototype, and it’s designed to provide efficient urban transport for people who don’t want their utter laziness compromised. (General Motors is also involved in the P.U.M.A., but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s doomed.) If Segway can convince people that these things are actually safe to drive, the company could reclaim its once-shining reputation as an innovator in transportation.
BrandFreak: Segway realizing most people are lazy and just want to sit down