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!

We get asked here four or five times a day, “So why should I use VibeAgent instead of, say, Orbitz or Expedia?”

I guess the answer to that question is so obvious to those of us that work in online travel, because we understand the intricacies of how the industry works.

But to you, the everyday traveler, this might not be so obvious. You just want to stay in a great hotel at the best available rate. And who can blame you! Why pay more than the guy down the hall staying in the same room?!

So, give me a few minutes of your time to lay out the case for Hotel Meta-Search. Keep reading, and I promise that what you’ll learn will save you thousands of dollars in hotel room fees, and make each and every one of your future hotel stays significantly more enjoyable.

VibeAgent searches each of our partner sites every time you use our site. This provides you with five major benefits, which I detail further below. They include: price; selection; room availability; time; and personalized recommendations.

PRICE
Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, Hotels.com, Priceline - each of these sites are what is called an Online Travel Agency, or OTA. Each OTA goes out and signs agreements directly with hotels and hotel chains to distribute their inventory on the OTA’s site. They each negotiate their commissions and specific agreements separately.

There are lots and lots of OTAs out there. You’ve probably heard of the brands I just listed, but you might not have heard of smaller niche OTAs such as TravelWorm or Agoda or Skoosh. Some of these smaller niche OTAs focus on specific hotel segments, such as independent hotels, or luxury hotels, or hotels in Las Vegas or Asia. Because they specialize, they can often negotiate even better rates for some types of hotels than the larger, more recognized OTA brands.

Also, there are two major room types in the industry; Net Rate rooms, and GDS (Global Distribution System) rooms. Net Rate rooms are negotiated specifically between the OTA and the hotel supplier. They vary from site to site. GDS rooms are rooms that are distributed via the big global distribution systems such as Sabre and Amedeus, and each OTA has access to the same rates.

So, one OTA may have negotiated a customized agreement - a Net Rate - directly with a specific hotel, whereas another OTA only has access to that hotel’s GDS room rates. In addition, an OTA may negotiate access to a specific room type (say, suites), or last minute rooms, or rooms on specific dates, etc., whereas another OTA doesn’t have the same agreement.

The bottom line is, there are lots of reasons why one OTA’s rates for a particular hotel may be different than another OTA’s rates for the same hotel. So, why would you want to risk booking a room from one OTA, when you might be able to get a better rate on the same exact room from another OTA?

Because VibeAgent searches over 20 leading travel sites every time you use our site, we can show you rates from multiple OTAs for the same hotel all on one page. The rates you see on VibeAgent are the exact rates you’d find if you searched each of our partners’ sites directly. So, by using VibeAgent’s hotel search you can be sure you’re getting the best price for the room that you’re going to book.

SELECTION
But it’s not just about pricing. Our largest partner has rates and availability for about 65,000 hotels. Because VibeAgent aggregates rates and availability from over 20 partner sites, we actually can show you rates and availability for over 120,000 hotels, almost twice as many hotels as our largest booking partner!

Remember, some of the OTAs we’ve partnered with focus on specific niches, like hotels in Las Vegas or Europe or Asia or high-end hotels or independent hotels. So when you search on VibeAgent, you’ll gain access to a much larger selection of hotels than you would searching any of our partners’ sites individually.

ROOM AVAILABILITY
As we discussed earlier, there are two major room types; GDS rooms and Net Rate rooms. While GDS rooms are centrally distributed on a first-come, first-serve basis, Net Rate rooms are distributed according to the individual agreements negotiated between an OTA and the hotel supplier. So, during busy periods, it is possible that a hotel’s GDS inventory is sold out, while a specific OTA still has availability through their Net Rate rooms. Using VibeAgent, a hotel is more likely to have availability than if you searched our partners’ sites individually.

TIME
Your time is valuable, and we know that! How long would it take you to search each of our partners’ sites individually to find the perfect hotel at the best available rate? Hours! In fact, the average travel consumer visits 4 to 10 sites every time they are looking for a hotel room.

VibeAgent’s proprietary meta-search technology and matching algorithm solves this problem by searching our partner sites and integrating their rates and availability all in one place, so you only have to come to one site - VibeAgent.com!

PERSONALIZED RECOMMENDATIONS
Finally, here’s an advantage that’s unique to VibeAgent. You can register on our site, and then post and share hotel reviews with your friends. We’ll keep track of your hotel preferences, and your friends’ hotel preferences, and integrate these social recommendations in how we display your hotel search results. So, if a friend of yours highly recommends a hotel in Paris, the next time do a search on VibeAgent for Paris, the hotel your friend recommends will appear at the top of the list of results along with a direct link to their hotel review.

Using VibeAgent, you can also tag your ideal hotel experience (e.g. Romantic, Stylish hotel with a Spa) and we’ll prioritize your search results accordingly. This way you can be sure you’re staying in the perfect hotel for you.

So, in conclusion, why wouldn’t you use VibeAgent for all your hotel searches? We hope you’ll think of us the next time you’re researching or booking a hotel room online, and feel free to help us spread the word.

It’s been described as Web 3.0, an evolution of the World Wide Web that will enable machines to infer meaning from the content that exists online. Some have even called it the beginning of ubiquitous artificial intelligence (I bet Bill Joy is stocking his pantry right now).

Not a lot of people understand the semantic web. I mean, the king of blogging himself, Robert Scoble, just figured it out last week. I feel pretty good about that. He’s only got a week’s head start on me.

Given the obvious importance of understanding how to prevent the world from being overrun by robots, I decided to educate myself about SW (yeah, i’m down with the acronyms). What I’ve learned is that Tim Berners-Lee is one smart dude (yeah, this SW thing was his master plan). And also this: while the web is really good at helping people interact with computers and with other people, it’s not very good at helping computers interact intelligently with each other…yet. Primarily, because no instrinsic meaning is conveyed about the data being transported over the series of tubes.

As we all know, HTML is the computer language that helps position content on a web page. Let’s say I type “Boar’s Head Inn Charlottesville” into Google. My search results will be based on Google’s servers going out to find instances where that text, or some variation thereof, appears on a web page. It will then rank those pages based on how many other pages on the web link to them, and weight these links according to the popularity of the sites from which they originate (PageRank).

What Google’s servers don’t do is understand whether or not the text they’ve unearthed on the web pages they have searched definitively relate to the Boar’s Head Inn in Charlottesville. They use the hotel’s name and links between pages as a proxy to determine relevance.

Well, what if we could skip that entire step? If the actual Boar’s Head Inn was assigned a unique identifier, any time data related to it was stored in a database, it could automatically be grouped with any other data on the web that related to the Boar’s Head Inn. Machines would take care of determining absolute relevance because they would be able to communicate directly with each other about the meaning of the data they were comparing, not simply the content.

Machine #1: I’ve got data on the Boar’s Head Inn. See? It’s F5rD40FY586. My data relates to room rates and availability.

Machine #2: Oh yeah. F5rD40FY586, I’ve got that too. My data relates to user recommendations. Let’s put ‘em together.

Machine #1: Well that was easy. Wanna go grab a coffee?

As a computer language, HTML is great at helping organize the name, address, photo and description of the Boar’s Head Inn on a web page. But where it falls short is providing computers with any meaning related to that content. That is where RDF, or Resource Description Framework, comes in. Developed in 1999, RDF provides universal standards for the structure of information online. RDF facilitates the semantic web by enabling the evolution of the storage of information from a natural language format to a universal structured format that is easy for both people and computers to understand.

So now, back to our Boar’s Head Inn Charlottesville search. With SW, I don’t have to spend my time figuring out which search results are relevant to me. The computers do that for me. I can instead spend my time on more efficient tasks. Such as what, you ask?

John Markoff at The New York Times has done some solid reporting on the subject (behind a registration wall), and offers some insight into what you might be able to do with the semantic web:

Whereas today’s travel recommendation sites force people to weed through long lists of comments and observations left by others, the Web. 3.0 system would weigh and rank all of the comments and find, by cognitive deduction, just the right hotel for a particular user.

Of course, you don’t have to wait for the semantic web to be able to access that functionality. You simply have to sign up to be a beta tester for VibeAgent.