It started in London, made it’s way to New York and found a place among Las Vegas hotels, and now, the the Hard Rock chain is heading for the islands. The legendary hotel chain is planning to open its first all-inclusive resort and casino next spring in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.

The 1800-room Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Punta Cana will brand all the comforts of rock and roll with the five-star Moon Palace Resort all-inclusive experience. The hotel will include “Rock Star” suites with luxury accommodations, including double Jacuzzis and double showers and an extensive collection of Hard Rock’s authentic music memorabilia including an Eric Clapton guitar.

Taking a nod from its Las Vegas hotel counterpart, the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Punta Cana will feature one of the largest casinos in the Caribbean with more than 48,000 square feet of gaming space including a high-limit poker room, a VIP lounge and a Race and Sports Book, in addition to 457 slots and 40 tables featuring Baccarat, Black Jack, Craps and Roulette, according to the company’s press release.

If you’re eager to get your game on, and recoup your losses (or celebrate your wins) on the beach the next day, the Hard Rock Hotel Punta Cana is slated to open in the spring.

The new hotelicopter review platform is now live! Our new system lets you:

- post your reviews to your facebook news feed
- review a hotel from any place hotels appear on our site
- see when your Facebook friends have reviewed hotels in your search results

If you want to start rating hotels on hotelicopter, simply conduct a search from our home page and click “Add Rating” on the hotel you wish to review.

We are the first major travel site to provide full integration with Facebook for sharing hotel reviews.

We believe our new hotel review platform will make it even easier to use hotelicopter to find the perfect hotel at the best available price!

If you’re one of our original users from the VibeAgent days, you’ll be receiving an email shortly with a link to your account where you’ll find all your old hotel reviews available in our new format!

You can read our official press release here: hotel ratings live on hotelicopter.

The following is the story of how hotelicopter punk’d the Internet for fame and profit.

I’ve just returned from the EyeforTravel Marketing Conference in Miami, where I presented The Anatomy of a Successful Viral Marketing Campaign (the story behind our new brand launch) to many of the leading marketers in our industry. I was pleased to see that the new brand for our hotel search engine, launched a month earlier for only $3,000, had about 70% brand recognition within the audience.

In case you missed it, we launched a viral marketing campaign on March 27th based on a fictional flying hotel. You can still view the April Fool’s Day web site here and the video here.

As many of you already know, we decided to change our name and our brand because VibeAgent (our previous name) did not accurately represent our new positioning as a hotel search engine. We were looking for a new brand that a) related to hotels; b) was fun and social; c) was memorable; and d) provided us some SEO lift for the word “hotel”.

So after much brainstorming, we decided on hotelicopter. The name clearly relates to hotels, is fun, memorable, and gives the Google bots some red meat to chew on.

Our newly rebranded and redesigned site is the first major travel site to utilize Facebook Connect as its user system. This means that users can create an account on hotelicopter simply using their Facebook account credentials and instantly have their Facebook and hotelicopter accounts linked to each other. No need to recreate your social network either - it travels with you from Facebook to hotelicopter. We’ve also integrated TripAdvisor hotel reviews and many improvements to the user flow and feature set on our new site.

As we were scheduled to launch hotelicopter.com April 8th, we found ourselves in the fortunate position of launching a new brand based on a fictional flying hotel right after April Fool’s Day. Our launch campaign practically created itself: we would bring a flying hotel to life as an April Fool’s Day prank to build pre-launch buzz and drive inbound links to our new domain name. The Hotelicopter was born.

Mil-V12

The largest helicopter in the world is the Mil-V12, a Russian-made vehicle created in the 1950’s of which only two were ever made. If we were going to create a plausible flying hotel it had to be big. The Mil-V12 provided the perfect inspiration. We simply added an extra floor to house the Hotelicopter’s 18 luxurious rooms, yoga studio, art gallery, and koi pond - and four GE turbo-thrusters to provide the power necessary to lift and transport the extra weight.

The Hotelicopter

Once we had an idea of what our flying hotel would look like, we turned to the talented designers at PerspectX to create a 3D model of the Hotelicopter and make it come to life, and the equally talented Aidan Keith-Hynes at Starlight Productions to do the post-production work on the raw footage. We called Yotel, the English-based airport hotel chain, and asked if we could have permission to publish photos of their hotel rooms on our site and credit them with designing the interior of the Hotelicopter, and they agreed. We put a web site together in-house using a free WordPress template, and created a press release of Hotelicopter’s launch that was downloadable from the site (we did not, however, push our fictitious press release out over the wires, as we felt that would be crossing an ethical boundary). With a web site, photos, video, and a press release, we were armed with the content we needed to launch our campaign.

The next step was to build out the distribution network. This consisted of setting up accounts with the usual suspects - YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter - and providing visitors to our April Fool’s Day web site easy links to watch our video, join our fan page, and follow us in the twittersphere. We complemented these three communities by posting our high resolution video on Vimeo and posting our Hotelicopter photos on Flickr.

With the content and distribution networks in place, it was time to strike the match. That’s when the social news and bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Reddit came in. Each of these channels provided us access to unique audiences of early adopters, or to coin Malcolm Gladwell’s terms from The Tipping Point: Connectors, Mavens, and Salespeople.

With this campaign, our hook was simple: “Wow, check out the world’s first flying hotel!” Within a few hours of posting a few hooks, we caught our first big fish.

Measuring Campaign Buzz

Gizmodo, the top ten blog focused on consumer technology, posted at 6:20pm on Friday, March 27th about the Hotelicopter after being tipped off by a loyal reader (Kyle Redinger, the owner of the media site Cvillain - thanks Kyle!), and mayhem ensued. We had decided to host our April Fool’s Day web site at GoDaddy under a basic account, and our site was quickly brought to its knees from the ensuing traffic. We quickly upgraded our account to handle the extra load, but for several hours people had a hard time reaching our web site to learn more about the world’s first flying hotel. In hindsight, this may simply have contributed to the buzz - 130 people posted comments to the Gizmodo blog entry, with the general gist of the conversation revolving around the questionable veracity of this new vehicle.

Once Gizmodo posted their story, hundreds of amateur bloggers had an interesting story to post about and the visual candy to support it, and inbound links to www.hotelicopter.com started piling up. This grassroots momentum kept site traffic and buzz going at a steady rate for the next three days, catalyzed by celebrity tweets from David Pogue of The New York Times and Guy Kawasaki of AllTop.com and the perennial Internet conference circuit. Gizmodo’s post was followed up three days later, on March 30th, by sister site Engadget, the third most heavily-trafficked blog online. Again, the post was fairly straightforward, discussing the Hotelicopter as if it were real, albeit somewhat aerodynamically ill-conceived.

But this time, only two days before April Fool’s Day, readers dug a little deeper into the story and started calling Engadget out in the comments section for getting “punk’d” by The Hotelicopter. In a surprising move, Engadget actually pulled the post completely from their web site that night, most likely prompted by Gizmodo’s retraction post earlier in the day entitled The Hotelicopter Outed as a Fake. And Wired magazine posted an uppity blog post entitled Hotelicopter Hoax Flies Over Bloggers’ Heads - ironically it turned out - about how lame the other big blogs were to get punk’d by The Hotelicopter, even though they themselves incorrectly credited the source of the hoax and botched their fact-checking about the actual Russian Mil-V12 helicopter (which they were quickly taken to task for by their readers in the comments section).

Web Site Page Views

However, the story was far from dead. While Gizmodo, Wired and Boing-Boing were declaring The Hotelicopter a sham and incorrectly crediting Yotel with a “brilliant hoax,” plenty of people - the vast majority in fact - still believed The Hotelicopter to be real, discovering it on our web site, an amateur blog, or YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, or one of the many social bookmarking and news sites that were helping spread the word about our flying hotel. During all this we were tickled pink, as you can probably imagine, as the goal of our campaign was to generate buzz and inbound links to our site, and the growing controversy about the veracity of our flying concoction was helping drive both beyond our wildest expectations.

Over this period of time, our YouTube video became the most popular video in the Travel category, and ultimately one of the 25 most-viewed videos for the week. Another thing that truly amazed us during this time was the geographic distribution of our site traffic. In the four days between our site launch and April Fool’s Day, the top five cities driving traffic to our site were New York, London, Moscow, Amsterdam, and Budapest. The Russians were eating it up! We weren’t sure if they were confused as hell or laughing their asses off.

Between Engadget’s post and April Fool’s Day we were averaging between 4,000 and 8,000 visits, and about 20 to 40 tweets, an hour. And except for a miniscule pay-per-click advertising campaign placed on Facebook, this was a completely viral campaign. It was being driven entirely by the online community.

Geographic Distribution of Web Traffic

On Wednesday, April 1st, our campaign reached its climax. We woke up that morning to a big article in The Telegraph, one of the biggest newspapers in the UK: Millions of web users fall for hotelicopter April Fool. The Huffington Post, the most heavily-trafficked blog online, featured us in their post about Best April Fool’s Day Pranks and linked to our video. Ryan Seacrest and Kanye West featured us on their personal blogs. We were featured on Daily Candy’s web site and in their popular email newsletter. We were even called by The Today Show the evening before and told we were going to be featured on their April Fool’s Day segment, but were ultimately bumped by the controversy surrounding Barack Obama’s choice of a birthday gift to the Queen of England (an iPod, of course).

On April 1st, 300,000 people visited our site, and over 150,000 watched our video on YouTube. Countless more learned about The Hotelicopter from another site or a friend that had read about it online. As the day came to a close, we moved the April Fool’s Day site from www.hotelicopter.com into the subdirectory aprilfools.hotelicopter.com, and launched the hotelicopter splash screen in its place. We wanted to continue the sense of mystery surrounding hotelicopter, and leverage all the buzz towards the launch of our new hotel search engine on April 8th. So we created a countdown on the page, and directed people to sign up via Facebook, twitter, or email to be notified with the “real” hotelicopter went live.

hotelicopter splash screen

While traffic and buzz died down considerably after April 1st, there was still a low rumbling in the blogosphere and twitterverse about The Hotelicopter, and some discussion as to what it could be if it wasn’t a flying hotel. In retrospect, we might have been even better served if we had been able to launch our hotel search engine on April 2nd, but our technology team was working miracles as it was to accelerate our launch forward a week from our previous plans, and it simply wasn’t possible. That being said, we continued to attract those inbound links that are ever so important in building page rank on search engines, and we now had a secret we couldn’t wait to share with the world.

On April 8th, hotelicopter (the search engine) went live, and was immediately picked up by TechCrunch - One Brilliant Hoax Later, Hotelicopter Joins the Hotel Aggregation Fray and CNet - Hotelicopter is Real, Though Simply A Hotel Search Engine. Site traffic was comparable to that for April 1st. And when Google finally assigned us a Page Rank of 6 at the end of May (VibeAgent had been a 5), we knew our objective had been fulfilled. In the final accounting, our viral campaign generated 1.1 million page views, 500,000 video views, lots of great buzz and media coverage, a solid page rank for a brand new domain, new friends and followers, and perhaps most importantly of all, a great story to share with all of you that hopefully brings a smile to your face.

In a bit of a footnote to this story, the best reporting on our fictitious flying hotel was found on Snopes.com, the site that determines the veracity of all things. On April 23rd, they came out with the verdict on The Hotelicopter with this lead-in:

Some April Fool’s pranks are so good they continue to circulate and ensnare the unsuspecting long after April 1 has come and gone. The Hotelicopter hoax is another such example.

So with this blog post, I hope we can finally put this prank to bed. We continue to get emails from journalists and travel enthusiasts, primarily from the Middle East, Asia, and South America where they don’t celebrate April Fools Day, asking about The Hotelicopter and how they can book a flight or feature it in their luxury magazine. My answer to all of you out there still looking for a flying hotel is this: you might just find one if you search long and hard enough on www.hotelicopter.com, our hotel search engine…

Hello VibeAgents!

I’m Lauren. I’m VibeAgent’s newest, coolest, and only intern. When I’m not hitting the books in my final semester as a history major at UVA, I’m doing my best to work some social media magic here at VibeAgent. So go for the bold and friend me - everybody likes new friends.

I come bearing exciting news: VibeAgent has just entered into two new partnerships! I spent the afternoon scoping out the web sites of our most recent collaborators, Tablet Hotels and FastBooking.com. I really liked both sites - and I’m not just saying that because they’re our partners. Here’s the need-to-know for each site:

Tablet Hotels
Tablet is an industry leader for luxury and boutique hotels. When customers are described as global nomads and Anna Sui can be purchased directly from the web site, you know you’re dealing with a certain type of consumer. Tablet caters to an educated, upscale clientele, and it caters well. Here are a few of my favorite things about Tablet:

1. The site is clever, and really well-written. It gives its users credit. The copywriter seems like an interesting person to meet up with over a glass of Merlot. It’s fun to explore.

2. A number of appealing site features differentiate the site from its competition. Tablet offers a variety of search options: searches by destination, hotel name, child-friendly amenities, “I just want to get away” escapes, local getaways, groups, and hotel deals. “Tablet10″ lists outline the top ten user-rated hotels in categories ranging from “Best Service” to “Best Design”. “TabletPlus” members receive special privileges at some hotels, including complimentary upgrades, champagne, late check-out times, and spa vouchers. But, perhaps my favorite features are hotel reviews from guest experts, who include Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Kevin Roberts, the CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi (Cuba likes the Mondrian).

3. In addition to vacations, Tablet offers its users a variety of products for purchase - and they’re interesting. Books offer behind-the-scenes insight into the world’s top new hotels, replete with hotelier, architect, and designer interviews. Music compilations are provided a-la boutique hotels which offer guests complimentary CDs. Music compilations are provided by boutique hotels themselves, offering users suggested playlists. The TabletStyle designer list reads like a who’s who of fashion: Alexander McQueen, Burberry, Versace; the list goes on. Seasoned shopaholics will also find heaven in the site’s luggage, accessory, and beauty selection.

4. But you don’t need a Christian Dior wardrobe to afford the hotels and resorts featured on Tablet. Tablet offers an incredible diversity of hotel rooms with unique location, design, atmosphere, and landscape combinations. Want a hotel that is both “hip” and offers “horseback riding”? Tablet has it. Craving a jungle landscape which offers the luxury of fishing? You’ve got it. This broad scope also extends to price ranges. Tablet offers a budget section with rates beginning below $100/night, as well as featured discounts and vacation package.

The following experience epitomizes why I like Tablet: I clicked on the tongue-in-cheek “I just want to get away” search feature, and entered the parameters “unusual landscape”, “secluded atmosphere” and “romance”, in the spirit of Valentine’s Day. The computer immediately spit back a list of properties ranging in price, and in locales exotic as Tuscany, Maldives, India, and…. Keswick Hall, twenty minutes away from my apartment. To me, that was really cool.

Fastbooking.com
On to the next! Fastbooking.com is equally cool, but in an entirely different way. It’s a provider for a different demographic. The site emphasizes its assets right up front: no online prepayment required, no booking or cancellation fees, steep discounts, an expansive list of participating hotels and user comments, and direct links to hotel websites. This direct hotel contact translates into greater accessibility, and I love that users pay nothing until arriving at the hotel. The site is very straightforward, which makes it super easy to use, and it’s really easy to find a cheap hotel. An interactive map organizes customer searches by country, region, and state, with results narrowed down by travel criteria and city or city district. Fastbooking is based out of Paris, with hotel partners extend past Europe to such faraway destinations as Cuba and China.

Individual hotel-specific pages have high clarity and ease of use, as well. Hotel pages feature contact information, photographs, descriptions, local points of interest, distances from local airports and train stations, parking, and hours. Page sidebars offer a variety of helpful information about rooms, hotel facilities and services, hotel reservations, location, customer reviews, and key points of the hotel.

I have a few favorite Fastbooking features. The site highlights hotels with high customer ratings, and generates destination-specific travel deals. It’s video-enabled, which really helps to contextualize each hotel: how big is the reception area, what does the view from a room look like, is the bathroom counter really marble, etc. The key points section of the hotel page sidebar is also fun. It outlines perks ranging from flat screen and fitness center to bathrobes and wood-burning stoves. All of these capabilities serve to create a highly-specific user understanding of each hotel property.

It’s not only the site which appears accessible and user-friendly. The team looks friendly, as well. Management seems smart and capable. The marketing team looks outgoing. The customer relations team looks nice! It’s excellent to be able to look at the “About Us” section of a website and think, “Wow, these people seem cool.”

So, that’s the news! Tablet Hotels and Fastbooking.com are the two newest associates to join our lineup of 30+ partners. We’re excited to be able to work with them because they’re awesome companies, and because we know that these partnerships will allow us to better serve you, our users, and to help you find the best hotel deals at the best hotels for you!

Talk to you soon,

Lauren

We get asked here four or five times a day, “So why should I use VibeAgent instead of, say, Orbitz or Expedia?”

I guess the answer to that question is so obvious to those of us that work in online travel, because we understand the intricacies of how the industry works.

But to you, the everyday traveler, this might not be so obvious. You just want to stay in a great hotel at the best available rate. And who can blame you! Why pay more than the guy down the hall staying in the same room?!

So, give me a few minutes of your time to lay out the case for Hotel Meta-Search. Keep reading, and I promise that what you’ll learn will save you thousands of dollars in hotel room fees, and make each and every one of your future hotel stays significantly more enjoyable.

VibeAgent searches each of our partner sites every time you use our site. This provides you with five major benefits, which I detail further below. They include: price; selection; room availability; time; and personalized recommendations.

PRICE
Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, Hotels.com, Priceline - each of these sites are what is called an Online Travel Agency, or OTA. Each OTA goes out and signs agreements directly with hotels and hotel chains to distribute their inventory on the OTA’s site. They each negotiate their commissions and specific agreements separately.

There are lots and lots of OTAs out there. You’ve probably heard of the brands I just listed, but you might not have heard of smaller niche OTAs such as TravelWorm or Agoda or Skoosh. Some of these smaller niche OTAs focus on specific hotel segments, such as independent hotels, or luxury hotels, or hotels in Las Vegas or Asia. Because they specialize, they can often negotiate even better rates for some types of hotels than the larger, more recognized OTA brands.

Also, there are two major room types in the industry; Net Rate rooms, and GDS (Global Distribution System) rooms. Net Rate rooms are negotiated specifically between the OTA and the hotel supplier. They vary from site to site. GDS rooms are rooms that are distributed via the big global distribution systems such as Sabre and Amedeus, and each OTA has access to the same rates.

So, one OTA may have negotiated a customized agreement - a Net Rate - directly with a specific hotel, whereas another OTA only has access to that hotel’s GDS room rates. In addition, an OTA may negotiate access to a specific room type (say, suites), or last minute rooms, or rooms on specific dates, etc., whereas another OTA doesn’t have the same agreement.

The bottom line is, there are lots of reasons why one OTA’s rates for a particular hotel may be different than another OTA’s rates for the same hotel. So, why would you want to risk booking a room from one OTA, when you might be able to get a better rate on the same exact room from another OTA?

Enter the direct booking channel. One thing you don’t find on OTA sites is the ability to book directly with the hotel’s web site. As hoteliers increasingly seek to have customers book directly through them, this is becoming a more competitive channel for consumers. At VibeAgent, we’ve partnered with many of the leading hotel chains, and continue to develop new relationships. We hope to be able to provide a direct booking channel to a significant percentage of our 150,000 by the end of this year. If you’re a hotelier looking to list yourself on our search engine, click the For Hoteliers link at the bottom of our site.

Because VibeAgent searches over 30 leading travel sites every time you use our site, we can show you rates from multiple OTAs for the same hotel all on one page. The rates you see on VibeAgent are the exact rates you’d find if you searched each of our partners’ sites directly. So, by using VibeAgent’s hotel search you can be sure you’re getting the best price for the room that you’re going to book.

SELECTION
But it’s not just about pricing. Our largest partner has rates and availability for about 65,000 hotels. Because VibeAgent aggregates rates and availability from over 30 partner sites, we actually can show you rates and availability for over 150,000 hotels, more than twice as many hotels as our largest booking partner!

Remember, some of the OTAs we’ve partnered with focus on specific niches, like hotels in Las Vegas or Europe or Asia or high-end hotels or independent hotels. So when you search on VibeAgent, you’ll gain access to a much larger selection of hotels than you would searching any of our partners’ sites individually.

ROOM AVAILABILITY
As we discussed earlier, there are two major room types; GDS rooms and Net Rate rooms. While GDS rooms are centrally distributed on a first-come, first-serve basis, Net Rate rooms are distributed according to the individual agreements negotiated between an OTA and the hotel supplier. So, during busy periods, it is possible that a hotel’s GDS inventory is sold out, while a specific OTA still has availability through their Net Rate rooms. Using VibeAgent, a hotel is more likely to have availability than if you searched our partners’ sites individually.

TIME
Your time is valuable, and we know that! How long would it take you to search each of our partners’ sites individually to find the perfect hotel at the best available rate? Hours! In fact, the average travel consumer visits 4 to 10 sites every time they are looking for a hotel room.

VibeAgent’s proprietary meta-search technology and matching algorithm solves this problem by searching our partner sites and integrating their rates and availability all in one place, so you only have to come to one site - VibeAgent.com!

PERSONALIZED RECOMMENDATIONS
Finally, here’s an advantage that’s unique to VibeAgent. You can register on our site, and then post and share hotel reviews with your friends. We’ll keep track of your hotel preferences, and your friends’ hotel preferences, and integrate these social recommendations in how we display your hotel search results. So, if a friend of yours highly recommends a hotel in Paris, the next time do a search on VibeAgent for Paris, the hotel your friend recommends will appear at the top of the list of results along with a direct link to their hotel review.

Using VibeAgent, you can also tag your ideal hotel experience (e.g. Romantic, Stylish hotel with a Spa) and we’ll prioritize your search results accordingly. This way you can be sure you’re staying in the perfect hotel for you.

So, in conclusion, why wouldn’t you use VibeAgent for all your hotel searches? We hope you’ll think of us the next time you’re researching or booking a hotel room online, and feel free to help us spread the word.

Following the landmark ruling by the California Supreme Court, same-sex couples from across the country have a new reason to visit The Golden State.

Wondering what California’s top-rated gay-friendly hotels are? While we at VibeAgent do the leg work for you to find the best hotel deal on the internet, our community of savvy travelers has done the work to identify California’s top-rated gay-friendly hotels.

The top recommended romantic, same-sex friendly hotels at five of the most popular California destinations are:

San Francisco:
1) Le Meridien San Francisco
2) Clift Hotel
3) Mark Hopkins Intercontinental
4) Hotel Vitale-Embarcadero
5) Parc Fifty Five Hotel

Los Angeles:
1) Mondrian West Hollywood
2) Hyatt West Hollywood
3) Le Montrose Suite Hotel
4) W Hotel Los Angeles Westwood
5) The Beverly Hills Hotel

Santa Monica:
1) Le Merigot - A JW Marriott Beach Hotel
2) Huntley Santa Monica Beach
3) Georgian Hotel
4) Viceroy - Santa Monica
5) Shutters on the Beach

San Diego:
1) Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina
2) Hilton San Diego Gaslamp Quarter
3) Bristol Hotel
4) Hotel Del Coronado
5) Marriott San Diego Hotel and Marina

Santa Barbara:
1) Bacara Resort Spa
2) Hotel Oceana Santa Barbara

TechCrunch is reporting that Kayak will announce tomorrow it has raised $200 million to purchase Sidestep for $180 million in cash from the VCs funding both organizations.

I wanted to pass on our congratulations to Steve Hafner and his team at Kayak, and the shareholders over at Sidestep, for this move. The deal appears to value the new entity slightly north of $450 million. TC is reporting the new entity will have combined revenues of $85 million - assuming 15% margins, this equates to a P/E of about 35, which seems reasonable for the emerging market leader in a growing industry. According to TC, the new company is also taking on some debt to improve its ROE for shareholders, a seemingly wise move as the company appears to have some healthy cash flow to service interest payments.

I think this deal is further market validation of the meta-search model that VibeAgent utilizes and which consumers and travel suppliers alike increasingly prefer (see PhoCusWright’s latest research showing OTA hotel market share declining to 40% of total online bookings in ‘06 at the expense of travel supplier sites selling direct).

With meta-search, consumers get to view prices from multiple sites all in one place, so they know they are getting the best available rates, and suppliers get to maintain control over customer acquisition while increasing their margins (they pay sites like Kayak a CPC or CPA fee to drive customers to their sites directly, which is much lower than selling inventory at deep discounts to Expedia and others).

Of course, market consolidation brings new opportunities, and we look forward to taking advantage of those opportunities for the benefits of our users and shareholders in the coming months and years.

Once again, congrats to Kayak and Sidestep. This is an exciting day in the industry.

VibeAgent has announced a partnership with Venere, one of the leading European OTAs headquartered in Rome, Italy, to help bring you even better deals on European hotels.

Through our partnership, we’re bringing Venere’s 12,000 European hotels, B&B’s and inns in every price range directly to our users. We hope our European travelers will be particularly pleased with this partnership!

Viaggio Di Bon!

Technorati is great, but sometimes it’s hard to filter through the muck to get to the good stuff.

So if you happen to be looking for the definitive list of travel and tourism blogs online, Guido over at Happy Hotelier has come up with the most comprehensive list I’ve seen so far. There are more than 125 blogs and counting, so there’s plenty of reading to catch up on!

Thanks Guido, this is a great resource for those of us “in the biz”.

I’d like to thank my new friend Claude Benard, who writes the leading French travel 2.0 blog Les Explorers, for introducing his readers to VibeAgent.

Claude’s blog is mostly in French, but for all of us linguistically-challenged Americans, many of the interviews Claude conducts with travel 2.0 entrepreneurs are in English.

Thanks again Claude!