November 14, 2007

VibeAgent Steps Out Of Beta, Wants To Defeat TripAdvisor With People Power

Nick Gonzalez

12 comments »

Later today VibeAgent, a site that lets users find, rate and review hotels, will be announcing their site is out of beta at the PhoCusWright travel conference in Orlando.

We previously covered VibeAgent during their private beta and handed out some invites on Inviteshare. The easiest way to describe the site is as a more social TripAdvisor, which the company clearly wants to take down. Currently the site only deals with hotels, though. Members can log on to post reviews, ask questions, finding travel agents, and use some new features like mapping their trips. The system expresses a clear network effect, getting better at recommendations as you and your friends put more in the system.

The big question is whether VibeAgent will draw enough users to the site in order to generate a network effect. It doesn’t hurt that VibeAgent is prettier and a bit easier to use than TripAdvisor’s rather dated design. Still they’re yet another startup hoping to re-map the “social graph” to provide a more personalized experience.

However, their most touted feature is a socially powered search, which ranks hotel search results based on your reviews and those of your friends/groups on the site. The idea is that the trusted reviews through social networks are more important than anonymous ratings. If you happen to not have any friends on the site, you can also search through all reviews by general concepts, like “hip” or “for golfers”.

Their engine searches over 120,000 hotels amongst Priceline.com, Intercontinental Hotels, Holiday Inn, Skoosh, and Booking.com. While it worked well for big cities like San Francisco, California they missed results for some cities in the East Bay. VibeAgent needs to nail the product for the anti-social users before it expects people to feel comfortable investing their time into the system. I can’t see the service knocking out Trip Advisor with it’s seven years of accumulated reviews unless they can at least meet that basic need.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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thinks

November 15th, 2007 at 5:46 pm

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Mark Samson

November 14th, 2007 at 1:18 am

Lame. Another clone of a clone of a clone. When will the madness end?
Dolores Wheatly

November 14th, 2007 at 2:25 am

Innofest 2007

Innominds is planning to organize its 2nd Annual Convention and Customer meet (InnoFest 2007) in Santa Clara, CA on Friday, November 16th, 2007.

The common theme of Innofest2007 is “Defining business models and partnership objectives to gear up global growth strategies for the participants in the IT ecosystem”. During the Convention Party they plan on identifying and debating fundamental issues that will shape the future of innovation and software product development in the lines of the common theme.

Innofest2007 will be attended by Innominds’ ISV customers, business partners, prospect ISVs, VCs and industry analysts. The event provides a platform that would enable the players of this ecosystem to interact. It will be an opportunity for you to meet your peer community and learn from their business practices, potential partners, funding houses who may be interested in your products and analysts who may want to write about you in their features.

http://innofest2007.blogspot.com
micfo.com

November 14th, 2007 at 2:42 am

Yep, also how many people really use all features. Just wondering!
Anon

November 14th, 2007 at 3:38 am

I have to admit, I do like their UI. Most of these travel sites are down right ugly. It needs work, such as their hotel search takes you to a new page for the details, but its quite clean.

I really, really think I’ve seen their hotel search before. All look fairly similar, true, but the layout and how they use Google Maps seems familar. I know they copied it directly off someone, I just can’t place who.
nick of cebu

November 14th, 2007 at 5:32 am

Yes! Nothing like a good old rivalry! TripAdvisor have been sitting on their laurels, advertising too much and innovating too little, and their traffic has been dropping. Meanwhile, VibeAgent have a great slogan, a great product, but are starting from zero. This should be fun to watch.

Excellent post, Nick.
Jessica Mah

November 14th, 2007 at 7:14 am

Yay clones!

It’s not bad to have alternatives, but network effect means a lot.

What’s the ETA to the deadpool?
erick

November 14th, 2007 at 7:26 am

Nothing like a pointless moving list in the review section.
HGuide

November 14th, 2007 at 10:53 am

Here is a site that has absolutely no traffic. The site is pretty atleast, but nearly impossible to navigate and hardly usable.
elliottng

November 14th, 2007 at 11:43 am

Congratulations to VibeAgent on moving into public beta. There is definitely opportunity to provide better recommendations to travelers based on user generated content. We’re excited that another reviews-based community like VibeAgent is sprouting up, to complement players like TripAdvisor, Yahoo!Travel, iGouGo, Virtual Tourist, and other smaller communities.

At Kango, we’re addressing this in a different way, providing a meta-search of reviews and opinions across the Web, so you can base your decisions on the wisdom of the crowds no matter where that wisdom is found. VibeAgent’s challenge is building up a critical mass of reviews and community. This is a huge challenge when faced with big existing communities like TripAdvisor. But more consumer choice is a great thing, and we wish them the best of luck, and share the same passion to make travel work better on the Web.
www.carversation.com

November 14th, 2007 at 4:15 pm

cool
Adam Healey

November 14th, 2007 at 4:43 pm

Elliott,

Thanks for your comment. It’s nice to finally read a comment by someone that isn’t a 17 year old hater, but actually has relevant industry experience - jeez!

At VibeAgent, we’re focused on solving two real world problems.

1) Finding trustworthy hotel recommendations
2) …at the best available rates

People trust their friends, colleagues, and people similar to them. So we made a determination to build our review platform organically. I only need to read a few reviews from trusted sources, not 100 reviews from total strangers, to make an informed travel decision.

Elliott, you’re right that we face the critical mass challenge - what startup doesn’t! However, we believe that with Open Social, Facebook Platform, etc. etc. that we can solve the critical mass issue via marketing partnerships and open APIs easier than we can solve the trust issue without a review linked to a user profile.

But you’re absolutely right - with competition, customers win! And it is innovative businesses like Kango and VibeAgent that are paving the way in online travel.

At the end of the day, it’s not going to be the teenagers trolling TC’s message board that determine who wins the race - it’s going to be the market.