Recently VibeAgent launched its beta testing … finally…it was supposed to launch half April: As my DW says every day: “I hate those computers, there is always something!”
Eons ago, actually in March 2007, Adam Healy, co founder of VibeAgent, very kindly noted my T-List and L-List page in a post Most Comprehensive List of Travel Blogs Ever of the VibeAgent Blog that he apparently maintains to warm up the travel community for VibeAgent. Oops and now I noticed I didn’t add VibeAgent Blog to the T-List, although technically he didn’t add any content there. Ha ha, in the VibeAgent terms he acted there as a wallflower. Omission repaired in the meantime.
Adam promised me an invite to VibeAgent once the Beta would be launched. I got a bit sad when the invite didn’t arrive, while I saw Guillaume posting something about VibeAgent Hotel Blogs by Guillaume Thevenot a month ago and Les Explorers two weeks ago.
A couple of days ago the invite landed in my mailbox. Hurray
I rummaged around in the site a bit.
Presently Jens Traenhart has probably the most extensive post about VibeAgent. It is worthwhile reading!
What is VibeAgent About?
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.
If you want to write a review about a hotel somewhere, VibeAgent comes with an impressive list of hotels in the area you chose. All automatically and truely web2.0 alike. At this stage 83.000 hotels are accessible.
There will be no advertising on the site. This is a big advantage as for instance on TripAdvisor a lot of bandwidth is taken by all the ads.
On the other hand it will act as a meta search engine for all the providers of accommodation. A sort of portal to the portals.
It claims that if you are searching for a hotel they have the best available price for you. However in this beta phase you get only the result. There is no short list as I have seen on other price comparison sites.
A big advantage above other sites that generate user reviews, is that if you participate you can communicate with the fellow reviewers. Hopefully that sifts out the biased reviews.
In the meantime the number of invitees is growing exponentially to a couple of hundreds. I am curious to see if they can meet up the requested bandwidth ultimately.
How will VibeAgent cover its costs? It will receive a percentage from the bookings made.
Well we will see and I will keep you posted.
By the way, it was Esme’s today’s post, actually more of a rant, on Pajama Entrepreneur who triggered this post.
