I’d like to thank my new friend Claude Benard, who writes the leading French travel 2.0 blog Les Explorers, for introducing his readers to VibeAgent.

Claude’s blog is mostly in French, but for all of us linguistically-challenged Americans, many of the interviews Claude conducts with travel 2.0 entrepreneurs are in English.

Thanks again Claude!

Yes, there is a blog for everything.

I recently came across this one, which consists exclusively of photos of guests jumping on their hotel beds.

I love the Internet.

I’ve been getting quite a few requests to share a peek of VibeAgent’s UI. We’ve worked really hard over the last nine months to create an extraordinary user experience, so we hope you’ll like it. You can get a sneak preview of some screenshots here. Feel free to link to these if you’d like.

Oh, and if you haven’t already done so, we hope you’ll sign up to be a beta tester of our site. We’ll be opening the doors soon to invited guests.

It’s been a year to the day that Charles and I started working on VibeAgent. It’s been a great experience and the time has really flown by. We couldn’t have assembled a better team: Max, Chris, Jeff and Matthias - thanks for all your hard work to date!

We’ll be launching our private beta in early April. As the date emerges it becomes readily apparent how very many things need to be finalized before we can flip the switch. We’re all clocking 15 hour days right now - it’s fun, but it’s not for the faint of heart.

It’s exciting as we prepare to unveil what we believe will be a highly disruptive business model for the online travel space. We’re combining hotel reviews with meta search to provide our users with intelligent personalized recommendations at the best possible rates, and throwing it all on a social networking platform. If I was playing the “what are you” game at a Web 2.0 travel conference, I’d probably say we’re shooting for TripAdvisor meets Kayak meets eHarmony on top of a mini FaceBook. I may have exceeded the allowable number of variables in my equation, but what the hell. You only live twice.

Or perhaps I’d say, if I had a few mojitos in me (travel conferences can get pretty boring sometimes), “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!!!” and start flexing and making gorilla sounds. Whatever.

We hope you enjoy the site, and invite you to provide us comments, suggestions, rants and raves either here on our blog, or if you prefer, privately through the “feedback” link you can find at the bottom of every page on the site. We’ll try real hard to provide you with the best possible service we can. We want you to become as passionate about VibeAgent as we are.

So, enjoy and bon voyage!