Category: T-List

VibeAgent: The ultimate web 2.0 hotel site?

VibeAgent Home Page

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.

Hotelier becomes fiction writer: A Five Star Mistery

Karin
Karin Schmollgruber

Travel Bloggers are becoming a sort of travel bloggers community of their own: They read each others Blogs, refer and comment to each other and exchange tips.

Karin Smollgruber is based in Austria. She She uses her German language Blog Fasten Your Seatbelts as a means of communicating about her PR business Passion PR AT.

On several occasions I have hinted to my interest in Vienna. Along the road I got her attention. Some time ago she tipped me that she had interviewed Daniel Edward Craig of Opus Hotel and that she started to post some posts in the English language. Since then she has written some interesting posts in English as well.

I didn’t have enough time to follow up on this tip till now. In doing so now I found out that I had not followed up correctly on my claim to keep my T-List Page as complete as possible: I had completely forgotten to put her site in.

I have corrected that now. To date the number of Blogs on my T-List is 180.

Returning to Daniel Craig:

Daniel Craig
Daniel Craig

Daniel is the General Manager of Opus Hotel in Vancouver, Canada. He writes his own Blog General Manager’s Blog together with Katrina Carroll-Foster, Director of Sales & Marketing of the Opus Hotel.

One of the reasons he is writing a Blog is that he is a writer himself and that brings me back to the tile of this post: The first thriller Daniel is in the process of writing of has the title:

Murder at the Universe
Murder At The Universe

Murder at the Universe, an imaginary hotel in New York City. According to Daniel Craig‘s writers’ site the book is will be released in June 2008.

Update: And here is my own interview with Daniel: 10 Questions for (41): Daniel Edward Craig

Last edited by GJE on December 5, 2011 at 4:44 pm

Travel In Blogs : A new travel community?

Recently the blog Travel in Blogs seems to have started a sort of Travel Blog community. From the outset it seams a great idea, but there is hardly anything available on the site about the site, about who does it and why they do it.

What do you think?

Added 15 March:

The basic idea is that Bloggers submit stories that can be voted upon like the Diggs and Del.icio.us es of this world. In one view you can get the hottest posts. But there are many other alike initiatives. For the moment I am reasonably content with the Google reader which loads very fast and gives you a fast means of browsing the blogs you like to read. Another issue is that the admin (whoever he may be) seems to get his ideas from a blog that looks as if it is a pure scraper or maybe even a Splog. I wont mention it here because I don’t want to grant it a link.

It is registered in the name of a thus far undisclosed person at the same address as the “aggregators” or “scrapers” i am referring to:

DreamHost Web Hosting
417 Associated Rd #324
Brea, CA 92821
US
+1.2139471032

Record created on 2007-03-09 18:34:56.
Record expires on 2008-03-09 18:34:56.

Added after the comment of David of Travelhorizons:

There are some ramifications here why I am still not sure.

I suppose if it would be non – human, they would have programmed the spider bot so that it would publish posts (I submitted 3 or 4 myself) as soon as possible and would not leave them unattended for 48 hours or more. No attention is much more human than bot alike I would think.

Furthermore, I believe that I have seen Albert Barra making a comment somewhere that he had to do with this Blog. But I can’t reproduce the comment anymore. That would also explain why there is a Spanish section. Ah, wait, it was not a comment I can reproduce what I thought I had seen: it is this post More about the T-List, on his Blog, but my Spanish is insufficient to understand what he tells in his post, even if I use Alta Vista Babel Fish.

Also it is notable that as a comment on a post by self proclaimed spin doctor Martin Schobert, of the Austrian Blog in the German language, Kulinarisch Reisen (i.e. Travel Culinary) about The T-List a certain Danay asks attention for the Blog in question:

Can the T-List go Web2.0?

We have recently launched TravelinBlogs.com.

TIB is a social network for the Travel and Hospitality Community. This site allows you to submit an article that will be reviewed by all and will be promoted, based on popularity, to the main page.

We encourage all Blogs of the T-List to sumbit their content and get additional traffic to their blogs.

Best regards,
Danay

Danay seems human and like me not a native English speaker (“sumbit”).

So again: is it a hoax of for real, what do you think?

Update:

I’ve taken out the link as, sadly, when Albert tried to move the site to another server, he lost all of it. Later I met Albert at WTM in London. He is a very likable person.

Last edited by Happy Hotelier on February 25, 2010 at 9:14 am

The New T-List

The New T-List

The T-List (and L-List) initiative is spreading and spreading.

I try to keep track of both on my T-List and L-List page and before I add the suggestions of Cesar, I counted today 122 T-Listed Blogs and 44 L-listed Blogs.

And now Cesar Gonsales of the multi authored Argentina’s Travel Guide has given it a further kick by his post The New T-List and giving us an easy to read Table of the T-List which is most informative and he also created a new logo.

Cesar is the is the Layout-and-Code- Monkey-in-Residence for Argentina’s Travel Blog. He will occasionally sneak in a post, but for the most part stays behind the scenes and lives vicariously through reading (and editing, and laying out, and uploading) the wonderful adventures of our other writers.

But Cesar has to do a little bit more of copying and pasting when he wants to make the list complete 🙂

Great Idea by the way to put your country on the map: A Country Travel Blog Guide.

Its amazing to see how these initiatives start to reflect all over the world. Also notable is that the more the lists spread, the more well known travel and tourism Blogs are creeping into the lists:-)

After adding Cesar’s suggestions I count 133 blogs on the T-List

After The T-List: The L-List

On 7th March Paul Johnson of A Luxury Travel Blog launched the L-List

Calling all luxury bloggers!

Inspired by the recent T-List that’s doing the rounds, I thought it’s about time we started an L-List. As you may have guessed, L-List stands for Luxury List, and it provides luxury bloggers a means of being discovered. You might be blogging about any aspect of the luxury arena… cars… fashion… food and wine… travel… whatever. My goal is simple: I want the hard work of many luxury bloggers out there (Allison, Ava, Courtney, Deidre, Mary, Nicole, etc. – note to self: where are all the male luxury bloggers?!) to be recognized and hopefully the L-List can help in achieving that.

Pffff I am counting already 27 Blogs…What do I add?

Happy Reading over the weekend!

Well, I did believe I Blog about Luxury Travel and Luxury Accommodation…if you don’t believe me, please check out Happy Hotelier’s Luxury Tag, but alas I didn’t make it (yet) to the L-List (-:.

Look here for Paul’s Technorati Ranking.

Finally: From now on I will try to stay away from Lists for some time, because it can easily become an addiction 🙂

Added 14 March:

Well nobody less than Mary Winston Nicklin of The Informed Traveller was so kind to add me to the list.