Why do I like VibeAgent...

I have talked about it 2 weeks ago, I am really enjoying the new travel 2.0 venture VibeAgent. The main reason is because of the simplicity behind the website and how easy is to post reviews in less than 5 minutes (depending on how long is your review writing is obviously).

VibeAgent has been set up in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA by Adam Healey and Charles Seilheimer in early 2006. The team is of 6 people for the moment.

VibeAgent has been in beta testing since end of May and access is only authorised if you are invited by actual members. I have 23 invitations left if you are interested...

I have looked a bit in details about who is part of the Agents community For the moment, less than 498 individuals have joined the travel social networking site. And 208 have posted at least one hotel review (42% of the community is quite a good figure). In comparison with other hotel reviews sites, this is the first time I see that reviewers are ranked by the number of contributions (it reminds me of Amazon.com). I think it gives a bit of satisfaction for the people who take time to contribute. Nora is currently leading the way with 18 hotel reviews.

After building your profile, you can start posting your hotel review. The site is using Ajax and therefore have auto completion functionalities for the hotel name and city.

Then, you have 5 steps to complete your review (Rate the hotel, Tag the hotel, Write the review and Post pictures). Unfortunately, I haven't been able to work out the upload picture functionality. My pictures don't appear on my review afterwards.

Then, the review is instantly posted on the website which means there are no human interaction to check your review and its content. Maybe there is some robot banning rude words. I will let Adam explains this.

My review came out like this.

The community tool is also very well designed and easy to use. It gives on your personal homepage the latest reviews from your friends.

There are other functionalities I could write about. I will let you discover them. Forums will be added soon on VibeAgent.

Last but not least, there is a blog handled by the VibeAgent team which keep the users up to date with the development of the site. For example, Adam has announced a strategic partnership with Venere to make the hotels bookable on the site.

VibeAgent is definitely among the new travel 2.0 ventures to watch alongside WAYN, Vinivi and Trivop.

So well done to Adam and his team. I can't wait to see more functionalities in the future.

Again if you want to be an "Agent", let me know I have 23 22  21 20 invitations left.

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Technorati Tags: vibeagent, travel 2.0, travel social network, hotel reviews, travel community, adam healey

Comments

[Joyce]

I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Joyce

http://www.shunmigraine.com

[momofchloe]

The review was informative and makes the reader dig deeper into the actual experiences..i'll try this one next time.

[Lauren Kridel]

1. We just wanted to let you know about the new, transnational website, SneakySunday.com. Our site (www.SneakySunday.com) features unbiased recommendations for upscale restaurants, bars, hotels, shopping, leisure and live entertainment venues in over 90 cities across the US. We make these designations by using our local field representatives. Unlike companies such as CitySearch, our website is completely unbiased and therefore at no cost to you. That's how we build trust with our users.

2. Being a supporter of your website, the creators of Sneaky Sunday feel that we would like to work in conjunction with you. We noticed that your company links out to numerous websites that are within the same category as our own. Sneaky Sunday was wondering if you would be willing to place a link that connects your website to ours as well. In return, we would love to post a link of your website on our links page too. Definitely, Sneaky Sunday feels that this would be mutually beneficial to our companies.

3. Some of the features that make our website particularly functional and unique are as follows:
- We have a webpage (sneakysunday.tv) that features short form video reviews for numerous venues listed on our site
- You can make reservations for certain restaurants on our site (via OpenTable)
- The website varies its suggestions based on day of the week.
- We have a daily events calendar for every one of our cities
- Maps of the venues are provided
-You can also send the general information of the venue to your cellphone via text message

If you would be willing to post our link on your site, Sneaky Sunday would really appreciate it. If you desire for us to put up your link, please let us know. Also, if you could inform us- if you chose to do so- that you've posted our link, that would be great as well. Thanks.

-Lauren Kridel
Relationship Manager
Sneaky Sunday

[Jerry]

Guillaume,

I very much appreciate one of your available invitations to VibeAgent. I would very much enjoy being both a viewer and participant in what looks to be a much needed site. Thank you. Jerry

[Markus]

I'd love to get an invite if you have any left - the site looks promising.

[Martin Rusteberg]

Guillaume,

I would love to get one of your invitations, would be great if you could consider me.

Thanks,

Martin

[gje]

Guillaume,

Excellent post!

Would you mind to share how you get those brilliant screen shots?

[Adam Healey]

Guillaume,

Thanks so much for reviewing Vibes for your readers! We're really happy to have you on our beta team and we appreciate the great feedback we're getting every day to help us make the site even better. We'll also be making a big announcement next week so I'll be sure to be back in touch with you then!

Regarding two of your comments in the review:

1) We've looked into the post photo process and made a few tweaks based on your feedback, so we hope that it'll be even easier now to post photos. Do let me know if you have any trouble going forward. Right now, there is no limit to file size or format, but you do need to upload photos one at a time. We may add new functionality such that users can upload multiple photos simultaneously if our community requests this feature.

2) Regarding robots and spam, we do have this software in place for the Chatter feature, and we're currently integrating it into the Post Review functionality. In addition, any user can "flag as inappropriate" any review or comment - which immediately gets sent to us for editing or deletion. In this way, we rely on the community to police itself, and so far, we haven't had any problems with this. We also have Akismet in place to prevent spam from getting on the site in the first place.

Thanks again, and we would welcome any of your readers who want to join our beta team!

Cheers,

Adam