| Website | hotelicopter.com |
| Blog | hotelicopter.com/... |
| Category | Consumer Web |
| Employees | 15 |
| Founded | 6/06 |
| Description | Hotel search engine |
| Total | $3M |
| Seed, 7/07 Trip Davis | |
| Series A, 11/08 | $3M |
In 2009, VibeAgent was renamed as hotelicopter.
Founded in early 2006, hotelicopter is a hotel search engine.
The site combines hotel reviews, a unique meta-search tool and social networking in an effort to help people find the right hotel at the right price. The company is based in Charlottesville, Virginia.
hotelicopter’s competitors include Kayak, TripAdvisor and TripUp
| Website | VibeAgent.com |
| Blog | vibeagent.com/blog |
| Stage | Live |
| Launch Date | July 19, 2007 |
| Tags | hotels, hotel-search, social-networking, vibeagent, travel |
VibeAgent members can share reviews and hotel recommendations with each other across their social network of friends, colleagues and groups. Every user has a “Me” page which includes reviews, friend’s reviews, groups, group reviews, bookmarks, alerts and more.
The meat of the site is in the meta-search engine, which searches over 100,000 hotels worldwide to check rates and availability. When a search is made, users are asked to tag (by clicking on keywords) what their ideal hotel would offer. In addition, reviews and the user’s social connections are used by VibeAgent to show results in the order they are likely to appeal to the user. For instance, if another VibeAgent member has preferences that are similar to your own, a hotel liked by them will be prioritized in the search results. The search results page shows prices, ratings, reviews, tags and location (via Google Maps).
In addition to the search and social networking aspects of the site, VibeAgent users can write reviews, read reviews written by other members as well as experts and chat in the forums.
Something I found interesting while checking out the site is that they promise to personally reply to each and every email they get! I wonder if that includes spam.
