I had a great time in Washington D.C. this week. Charles and I were at the Masters Program, which is THE corporate travel event of the year, to learn more about the opportunities in the space and share some thoughts with others about the intersection of social media and corporate travel.

Presenters included Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize winner and CEO of the New America Foundation, and staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, Steve Barnhart, CEO of Orbitz, and David Cash, the CEO of Virgin America.

I was honored to join such a distinguished group of speakers presenting to 250 of the leading executives in the business about Social Media. I’ve provided access to my presentation here. I think we succeeded in raising some very interesting and pertinent topics for conversation, and the whole conference was an exhilarating and valuable experience, one I shall not soon forget.

My thanks to the Board of the Masters Program for putting on a fantastic event and giving us an opportunity to be a part of it.

(VibeAgent is a hotel search engine that provides you access to the largest selection of hotels and best travel deals.)

Power to the traveler!

Rob Lovitt of MSNBC wrote an article earlier this week discussing the increasing relevance of price comparison (i.e., meta-search) sites empowering travelers to filter and customize their search results - an advantage over traditional online travel agencies.

Enter VibeAgent. Not only can you can tag your search (e.g., romantic or boutique hotel), you can also use our maps to narrow your hotel search to specific city blocks.

We’re excited to be continually recognized for our efforts to help travelers make the best hotel choices! The innovation hasn’t stopped. There’s more to come!

(VibeAgent is a hotel search engine that provides you access to the largest selection of hotels and best travel deals.)

Here’s some fun news, just for you!

VibeAgent has just launched high quality, panoramic tours for over 4,000 popular hotels on our site. These videos can be accessed on the new “Video” tab” on each hotel’s detail page.

Visual merchandising is powerful - research has shown that photos and videos are one of the most influential pieces of information for travelers purchasing hotel rooms online.

We hope that the addition of these virtual tours to our price comparison engine and trustworthy hotel reviews will further empower you to make the best hotel choice possible using VibeAgent.com!

And the press just keeps on coming!

This Sunday’s Washington Post declared VibeAgent one of five up-and-coming travel sites you should know about - we appreciate the shout out WashPo!

The Washington Post also featured VibeAgent in their travel blog last September as a hip new hotel review site that was taking TripAdvisor to the next level - we dig it!

A few weeks ago I had the great opportunity to make a presentation on Social Media in Travel at the EyeforTravel Distribution Conference in London.

The premise of this presentation was “Dispelling the Three Great Myths of the Social Media Revolution” - helping travel distribution managers get their arms around social media and how it is affecting the travel industry, and specifically the future of supplier distribution.

These are the slides that accompanied my presentation, and are simply an outline of the content I presented. I am happy to be able to make them available here for public consumption using Scribd.com - another social media site!

You can find the presentation here.

Enjoy!

This week PhoCusWright, the market leader in travel industry research, launched a new feature called Innovation Snapshot, where they seek to present “fresh new companies, products, and ideas.” We’re excited that PhoCusWright chose to feature VibeAgent as the subject of their first feature.

“In short, VibeAgent is a metasearch tool for consumers to research and book hotels online. While there are certainly enough Web sites that facilitate direct and intermediated hotel reservations, this Web site pushes the envelope by integrating filters, user reviews and a robust social networking component that simplifies and personalizes the entire hotel booking process. In doing so, VibeAgent has created an engaging experience for reserving hotel rooms by encouraging travelers to envision the experience they seek – before the trip is ever taken…While its footprint is still fresh, VibeAgent is helping to mitigate the risk associated with hotel selections by leveraging the affinity and trust of social networks and creating an experience around hotel booking. Now, the hotel decision is more about its true fit for the guest and less about the amenities and price of a hotel/room. The pulse of this small travel firm is palpable and creating a vibe of change in online hotel marketing.”

Thanks PhoCusWright, we couldn’t have said it better ourselves!

Subscribers to PhoCusWright research can log in and access the full report online.

TechCrunch is reporting that Kayak will announce tomorrow it has raised $200 million to purchase Sidestep for $180 million in cash from the VCs funding both organizations.

I wanted to pass on our congratulations to Steve Hafner and his team at Kayak, and the shareholders over at Sidestep, for this move. The deal appears to value the new entity slightly north of $450 million. TC is reporting the new entity will have combined revenues of $85 million - assuming 15% margins, this equates to a P/E of about 35, which seems reasonable for the emerging market leader in a growing industry. According to TC, the new company is also taking on some debt to improve its ROE for shareholders, a seemingly wise move as the company appears to have some healthy cash flow to service interest payments.

I think this deal is further market validation of the meta-search model that VibeAgent utilizes and which consumers and travel suppliers alike increasingly prefer (see PhoCusWright’s latest research showing OTA hotel market share declining to 40% of total online bookings in ‘06 at the expense of travel supplier sites selling direct).

With meta-search, consumers get to view prices from multiple sites all in one place, so they know they are getting the best available rates, and suppliers get to maintain control over customer acquisition while increasing their margins (they pay sites like Kayak a CPC or CPA fee to drive customers to their sites directly, which is much lower than selling inventory at deep discounts to Expedia and others).

Of course, market consolidation brings new opportunities, and we look forward to taking advantage of those opportunities for the benefits of our users and shareholders in the coming months and years.

Once again, congrats to Kayak and Sidestep. This is an exciting day in the industry.

I’m very pleased to share with you the news that Dennis Ortiz has joined our team as our new Vice President of Marketing.

We’re thrilled to have someone of Dennis’ passion, drive, and industry experience on board. Dennis - welcome to VibeAgent!

Please see our official press release on this news below:

VIBEAGENT ADDS PRICELINE VETERAN TO MANAGEMENT TEAM

Dennis Ortiz joins VibeAgent as the new Vice President of Marketing

Charlottesville, VA, Friday, December 7th, 2007 – Continuing to build upon the momentum generated from the successful launch of its web site three weeks ago, VibeAgent.com is adding a veteran of the online travel world to its management team. Dennis Ortiz joined VibeAgent this week and will become the young company’s Vice President of Marketing. In this position, Mr. Ortiz’s responsibilities include developing and executing VibeAgent’s marketing strategy to help grow VibeAgent’s user base, review content, and hotel bookings.

Mr. Ortiz joined priceline.com in 1999, and as Director of Vacation Packages was responsible for revenue management and private-label partnerships. Prior to this appointment, Mr. Ortiz was the company’s Hotel Product Manager, and was instrumental in the development and international expansion of the company’s flagship Name Your Own Price™ hotel product.

In addition to his work at priceline.com, Ortiz has been a management consultant at Deloitte Consulting and worked in brand marketing at Kraft Foods. Mr. Ortiz holds an MBA from The Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia and a BS in Hotel Administration from Cornell University.

“We’re all very excited to have Dennis join our team. He’s a perfect fit for us. His passion, drive, and relevant industry experience ensure Dennis can have a significant impact from day one in helping VibeAgent achieve its ambitious goals for the future,” said Adam Healey, VibeAgent’s co-founder and CEO.

PhoCusWright, the leading travel research firm, estimates that online hotel bookings will total $86.6 billion in 2007 and grow by 20% in 2008. VibeAgent improves the hotel research and booking process by being the first site to offer travelers free personalized hotel recommendations, for more than 120,000 hotels, based on the content and connections within a traveler’s social network. VibeAgent then “meta” searches a multitude of travel and hotel web sites in real-time to find all the available room rates for each hotel, so users know they are booking their chosen accommodations at the best available rate.

About VibeAgent Inc.
VibeAgent.com is a new online resource for travelers to research and book hotel accommodations. It is the first and only site that combines user-generated hotel reviews, meta-search, and social networking to provide its users with free personalized hotel recommendat ions and booking at the best available rates. VibeAgent’s unparalleled meta-search engine assembles rates and availability for more than 120,000 hotels worldwide from leading sites and providers such as Priceline, HotelBook, InterContinental Hotels, Holiday Inn, Skoosh, Reserve Travel, Venere, Booking.com, Crowne Plaza, Staybridge Suites, TravelWorm, and Travel Intelligence. Founded in 2006, VibeAgent is based in Charlottesville, Virginia. For more information, please visit www.vibeagent.com.

In addition to all the many wonderful things we have to be thankful for this weekend, add one more - VibeAgent is featured on the front page of USA Today’s travel section! We’re very grateful to have our site launch covered in a paper with the widest circulation of any in the United States. Happy Thanksgiving!

It’s been an incredible week.

After an exhausting month getting our site ready for launch, the entire team is resting and enjoying a well-deserved weekend AFK (away from keyboard). Well, except for this blog entry.

We successfully launched our site at the PhoCusWright conference in Orlando, to overwhelmingly positive reviews. Travolution, live-blogging the event for the benefit of those who couldn’t (understandably) swallow the high entry fee or were otherwise indisposed, declared VibeAgent the biggest buzz of the conference. Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb, the highly respected tech blogger, delivered a very positive and thoughtful write-up covering our launch, as did Nick Gonzalez over at TechCrunch.

PhoCusWright did provoke some very interesting observations.

All four major OTA CEOs (Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, Priceline) paid tons of lip service in their keynotes to the need for the travel industry to increase the level of personalization, social interaction, and user content in the travel research and booking process. Even the President of American Express Corporate Travel discussed the importance of integrating social elements to their corporate travel platform. We couldn’t help but feel validation that VibeAgent is at the forefront of our industry’s trend towards personalization, socialization, and user-generated content.

Travelocity and TripAdvisor both announced their participation in Facebook’s Beacon platform. I can’t help but think that this one may come back and bite them in the face - pun intended. I believe consumers are wise enough to know the difference between an advertisement and a recommendation. IMO, Beacon blatantly exploits fb’s members by having them personally deliver advertisements to their friends.

Recommendations are requested, advertisements are not. In Facebook’s quest to monetize their greatest asset - the social connections that exist between its 50+ million users - they may be destroying the network’s utility and sacrificing long-term growth for short-term gain. The verdict is still out, but as Daniel over at Cloudbrain said over lunch last week, facebook users may quickly feel the need to get a spam filter for their news feed. I predict we see Facebook usage decline on a per-user basis over the coming quarters as a result. Or, Facebook will be left to the mall rats and opportunities will arise for other social platforms with alternative ways to monetize their user base *ahem*.