Today VibeAgent is relaunching its site as a Hotel Search Engine.

Our relaunch today is focused on making VibeAgent.com the #1 destination online to help you research and book a hotel room.

You’ll find the entire process of searching for a hotel room on our site greatly streamlined. We hope you’ll try it out and share this discovery with all your friends!

Entering Your Initial Search

If you’re doing a non-dated search, simply enter your location and go! If you want to further refine your search results, you can enter dates, your desired vibe, rooms/guests, even the specific hotel you are looking for or the currency in which you’d like to see rates.

You’ll find the font size for the location field larger for your viewing pleasure, and we’ve also significantly sped up our autocomplete.

We believe our new and improved calendar is the best online, anywhere, period.

Our double month view means you don’t have to scroll from month to month. You can even click on your check-in date, and then slide your mouse to your check-out date, making the date selection process super smooth. The calendar automatically closes after you’ve selected your check-out date.

Adding Your Hotel Vibe

To help you find the perfect hotel for your needs, click the button “Add Tags” to select the ambience, activities, and the type of guests the hotel is known for. You can select as few or as many tags as you want - we’ll use your requests to help filter and order your search results.

Adding Your Desired Location

Location is one of the most important criteria people use when making a hotel booking decision. VibeAgent’s unique location filter is the best in the business. For larger cities, you can choose to whittle down your search results to specific neighborhoods. You can also create a customized location filter - moving the borders of your search area wherever you want. You can even do this after you’ve gotten your initial search results and the search results will update in real time. Use this feature to narrow down your Manhattan hotel search, for example, to a specific city block.

Filtering Your Search Results

VibeAgent provides robust filters to help you narrow down your hotel search results in real-time so you can be sure you’re looking at the best hotels for your needs. These include a price filter, a star rating filter, a loyalty program filter, and an amenity filter. Do you want to stay in a hotel between $150 and $180 that is in the Hilton chain and has a pool and free breakfast? No problem! Let VibeAgent’s filters help you narrow down your hotel options accordingly; simply use your mouse to adjust the slider bars or check the boxes and your results will update instantly.


Comparing Your Rate Options

VibeAgent now parses the different room types that you can book, and shows you on the hotel’s room rates page the best rate for each room type in a summary view. Of course, to see other room rate options, you can expand each box by clicking on the “See all rates for this room type” link and the page will instantly expand to show you all of your available options. You can also filter this page by specific provider (e.g. Priceline or Hotels.com) if you only want to see rates from your favorite booking channel.

Navigating the Community Features

Finally, we’ve streamlined the main navigation on VibeAgent so it’s easier to find what you’re looking for quickly. We hope you find the new and improved VibeAgent.com site makes it even easier to find great hotels at the best available rates, and we look forward to servicing all your future hotel searches!

Following the landmark ruling by the California Supreme Court, same-sex couples from across the country have a new reason to visit The Golden State.

Wondering what California’s top-rated gay-friendly hotels are? While we at VibeAgent do the leg work for you to find the best hotel deal on the internet, our community of savvy travelers has done the work to identify California’s top-rated gay-friendly hotels.

The top recommended romantic, same-sex friendly hotels at five of the most popular California destinations are:

San Francisco:
1) Le Meridien San Francisco
2) Clift Hotel
3) Mark Hopkins Intercontinental
4) Hotel Vitale-Embarcadero
5) Parc Fifty Five Hotel

Los Angeles:
1) Mondrian West Hollywood
2) Hyatt West Hollywood
3) Le Montrose Suite Hotel
4) W Hotel Los Angeles Westwood
5) The Beverly Hills Hotel

Santa Monica:
1) Le Merigot - A JW Marriott Beach Hotel
2) Huntley Santa Monica Beach
3) Georgian Hotel
4) Viceroy - Santa Monica
5) Shutters on the Beach

San Diego:
1) Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina
2) Hilton San Diego Gaslamp Quarter
3) Bristol Hotel
4) Hotel Del Coronado
5) Marriott San Diego Hotel and Marina

Santa Barbara:
1) Bacara Resort Spa
2) Hotel Oceana Santa Barbara

We’re excited to announce the launch of a new feature on VibeAgent.com today; quick tagging!

Now you can tag a hotel from any search or hotel page without writing a review. Simply click “Tag this hotel” to pull up VibeAgent’s structured tagging system. Then click on the tags you believe best represent the hotel within the Ambience, Activities, and Recommended For categories.

Only registered users are allowed to tag hotels, and each user can only tag each hotel once. However, you can edit your selected tags at any time simply by clicking again on the “Tag this hotel” link. The system remembers the tags you have already selected. Review tags will remain more heavily weighted than quick tags.

Quick tags are another important factor in helping improve the relevance of VibeAgent’s hotel search results.

So don’t delay, get quick tagging today!

I think you’ll like this one.

Today we’re launching My Maps, personalized maps for each registered user on the site. My Maps is a customizable dashboard for each user to view their network’s friends, reviews, and groups, and quickly geo-search their personal network to make new friends, discover new places, and find the perfect hotel at the perfect price.

We really wanted to make something special for you by creating this map as a powerful yet elegant platform for exploring the world through your eyes. We spent months working to create what we hope will be nothing less than an extraordinary user experience.

With My Maps, your reviews, friends, and groups are all presented on your personalized map. Searching, sorting, and filtering this content is instantaneous and easy as pie. We’ve made it fast and fun to search your network of friends and groups to get great advice on where to stay on your next vacation or business trip.

You can read user profiles, hotel reviews, and group descriptions, or browse hotel photos all without leaving your map. You can zoom into a geography of interest and see who in your network has stayed there, and what they have to say about it. You can quickly jump to a friend’s map and see what’s brewing in their network. You can visit your Scuba group and see where they recommend staying on the Red Sea, or hop over to your Beaches group and see what they like in the Caribbean. All instantaneously.

This isn’t your grandfather’s Google maps mashup. It’s fun. It’s powerful. VibeAgent’s My Maps. Check it out. You’ll like it.

Man, that freaky alert banner was driving me @#$@#$%^ crazy.

So we trashed the whole alerts system. Came up with something better. Something freshy!

Introducing My News - it’s like a news feed of all the activity in your network OK, we’re not the first kids on the block to come up with this idea. True dat.

But we love our My News. And PLEASE don’t call it a feed. It ain’t a feed. It’s My News. You’ll notice that you now get informed when stuff happens between your friends and their friends. You find out people’s birthdays and stuff. It’s really neat. It’s freshy.

Oh, and if it starts to bug you, minimize it. No News is Good Gnus. You don’t have to look at it if you don’t want to. After all, it’s yours. It your My News. Enjoy.

After weeks of growing anticipation, yes, they are finally here - Forums!

We hope that you enjoy our shiny new forums. We created forums to enable you to ask questions and discuss topics not directly related to hotels. Curious about things to do or sites to see in the places you’re going to visit? Ask questions, answer questions, help your fellow travelers - get involved! Make new friends! Find a soul mate! Just DO!

Also, each group has their own private forum - only members of a group can post to threads in that group’s forum. Open groups will have their posts and threads visible to all, while forums for closed and private groups will not be visible by non-members.

A few neat things about forums: a) your profile travels with you, so you can quickly see who you’re chatting with; b) you can filter forums using Subject, Destination, and Group filters in real-time - making it super easy and quick to hone in on the content you’re looking for; and c) you can track posts to threads you subscribe to in your alert panel with just one mouse click!

As always, please don’t hesitate to share your feedback with us - we’re listening!

VibeAgents now have a cool new way to meet the newest members on the site! On the Agents tab, the scrolling column on the left-hand side cycles through the newest Agents - a simple click on an Agent’s photo takes you to his or her profile page where you can interact with them to your heart’s content!

We hope you enjoy this fun new way to meet our newest Agents - enjoy!

Beta Agents, we hope you’ll be pleasantly surprised the next time you visit your Me page. We’ve added an exciting new feature to VibeAgent - Chatter!

A new sub-tab is now visible under your Me tab called Chatter. The most recent five comments are also posted in your My Chatter section at the top of your Home page. And you’ll see that every public member also has a Chatter box (get it…chatterbox! hee-hee) on their home pages.

Using Chatter is as easy as breathing. Post your comment in the box, and click Post Comment. Done. The comment will immediately appear at the top of that page’s Chatter. If you want to make your comment a compliment, simply check the box next to “This comment is a compliment.” Duh.

Keep in mind that Chatter comments and compliments are public. If you want to communicate privately with another site member on VibeAgent, simply send them a Message instead. Both senders and receivers of Chatter can delete a comment anytime by clicking on the [Delete] link in the upper right-hand corner of each comment. Anyone can also flag any comment as inappropriate by clicking [Report This] in the upper right corner of every comment.

We hope this new feature will make it even easier to communicates with friends, old and new, on VibeAgent. We hope you like it. Please let us know what you think!

Some exciting developments are happening here at Vibe Central. We’ve been getting lots of great feedback (keep it coming) and we’re going to be rolling out some neat stuff in the coming days, including:

Forums! We promise these are gonna be the best darn forums you’ve EVER used. We thought about the design of these forums for literally weeks and weeks…focusing on making them both easy to use and easy to search. In addition, forums are going to be integrated seamlessly into groups - each group will have its own forum exclusively for its members. Wait’ll you see these bad boys - guaranteed satisfaction!

Partners! We’re integrating our next wave of transaction partners as we speak, so you’ll be gaining access to pricing and availability from Priceline, InterContinental Hotels, and Booking.com, in addition to Reserve Travel and Venere. We’ve also got our next wave of partners lined up, as yet unannounced, but that’s for a future post.

Improved Search! We’ve created an intelligent social search algorithm to provide you with search results customized to your tastes and preferences. However, we’ve learned that in order for this to work well, we need a baseline of content on the site. As an interim step, we’ll be adding additional sort options and search filters to help you get maximum benefit from our hotel search.

Greater Interactivity! In the coming days we’re going to be rolling out a whole new level of interactivity, in addition to forums, that will make it even easier and more fun to communicate with your friends, colleagues, and other agents on the site. This one I’d like to keep a bit of a surprise, but I promise it will make you happy

We’ve got a bunch more exciting stuff coming down the pipeline, but this is all I’ll be sharing for now. In the mean time, please keep that feedback and those reviews coming! We’re excited by our experienced, international beta group, and we appreciate all of your efforts in helping to create a diverse and helpful community of passionate travelers.

If you have any neat ideas for new functionality that you’d really like to see on Vibes, please post it in the comments below!