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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Any profitable sector of the internet is bound to draw the eyes of new startups. This is particularly the case for the $78.8 billion online travel industry. It’s spurred the development of over a dozen meta-search engines, trip trackers, and trip planning tools.

The latest travel site, VibeAgent, should look familiar to you. It’s TripAdvisor with a social networking twist. Like TripAdvisor, you can use the site to find, review, and book hotels (TripAdvisor also does flights). However, on TripAdvisor, everyone gets the same reviews. It can be hard to guess at motivations behind the poster, or how relevant they are to your tastes and preferences. They recently received an undisclosed seed round of funding from Trip Davis, President and CEO of the publicly traded TRX Inc.

VibeAgent helps add context to the reviews and search results by exposing the profiles of the reviewers and ranking search results based on your relationship to the reviewer. Reviews consist of text, ratings, and photos of the area. Every review is labeled by the person who posts it and ranked in search results with review by similar reviewers, friends, and members of groups you’ve joined pushed to the top. The idea is that these people have the opinions that you can trust and which are closest to your views. Of course, if you don’t join the system, they won’t have very many details to base their results on.

So far VibeAgent is sticking to hotels because they want to focus on purchases with subjective aspects. Flights are fairly commoditized, with pretty much every airline sticking you in the same cramped chair. Hotels are hard to assess from a price tag and even a photo, which is the reason VibeAgent wants to personalize reviews. Their next target will most likely be vacation homes.

One of the major problems review services have with getting of the ground is building a critical mass of reviews before it becomes a self sustaining community. Yelp has done it by focusing on a few metros and copious amounts of parties. VibeAgent, with their older crowd, plans on rewarding top users through “travel-related” rewards.

While the service is still in private beta, they’ve also extended a 100 invites to us available on InviteShare.

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