I am very pleased to announce that effective immediately, Trip Davis has been appointed Chairman of hotelicopter.

We’re very pleased that Trip has accepted this invitation to become our Chairman. Trip has been on our Board since the close of our seed financing round two years ago and has been an invaluable advisor and mentor to our business. He has a keen understanding of the online travel landscape, experience building businesses from scratch, and relationships with key companies and executives throughout the travel industry. He’s the right person to help us take hotelicopter to the next level.

Trip is the Co-Founder and Chairman of TRX, a global leader in travel technology and data services. TRX develops and hosts software for reservation processing, online booking, and data intelligence. The company delivers its technologies in an on-demand environment to travel agencies, corporations, travel suppliers, government agencies, and credit card associations. Publicly traded on NASDAQ (TRXI) and based in Atlanta, the company processes over $400 billion per year in travel volume and employs 800 people in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and India.

Trip co-founded TRX in December 1999 and served as the CEO and a Board member for nine years. He was named Chairman of the Board in December 2008.

Charles Seilheimer and I look forward to working with Trip on our Board in the months and years ahead as we take advantage of the many exciting opportunities in front of us.

Please join me in welcoming and congratulating Trip as our new Chairman of the Board.

You can find the official press release here.

We’ve got some pretty big news to share with you all today.

After many late-night beer-induced soul-searching sessions, we decided that it made sense for us to rebrand our business.

Specifically, we were looking for something that was more relevant to hotels, more memorable, and had more personality. We were also looking for a brand that could better represent all the neat things we’ve been working hard on for the last six months.

So I’m very proud to announce that VibeAgent, henceforth, is now hotelicopter! You can read the official press release here. We hope you like our new brand and our new site. We’ve made significant improvements in usability in direct response to feedback from our community.

Here’s five big upgrades:

1) Integration with Facebook Connect: We’ve replaced our user system entirely with Facebook via Facebook Connect. While you don’t need an account to use hotelicopter, if you want one all you need to do is type in your Facebook credentials - your profile and privacy settings will follow you to our site. Over time, we’ll be adding more cool features to make it easier to share recommendations and travel deals with your friends.

2) More Hotel Reviews: We’ve teamed up with one of the biggest players in the industry (you know the one) to display hotel reviews for most of our hotels. So now there’s no need to visit multiple travel sites when researching your trip - hotelicopter has all the content you need in one place.

3) Comparison Feature: We’ve added a cool feature that lets you compare hotels with each other without leaving the search results page - making it even easier to decide where you want to stay on your next trip.

4) Book Direct with Hotels: Whenever possible, we help you book directly with the hotel when that’s available through one of our partners. You’ll see us continue to focus on helping you book direct with either the hotel or your favorite online travel agency.

5) User Flow: We’ve re-architected the entire site experience to make it easier to navigate and get access to the content you need to make good decisions. Enjoy!

Oh, and yes, we’re the folks behind the flying hotel of the same name. We were just having some fun, and had no idea it was going to blow up like it did - we’ve gotten about 1.5 million page and video views just in the last week - so thank you very much for all the attention and support - and hopefully we made you smile