VibeAgent Shifts Focus From Web 2.0

In an e-mail to users yesterday, VibeAgent.com announced a fundamental market and product repositioning that shifts its focus from being a hotel-centric social networking community to follow a more traditional travel search engine formula.

VibeAgent’s revolutionary algorithm-based technology, which learns users’ preferences and interests and sorts search results accordingly, remains intact. (Read my article about this kind of technology from the July issue of HOTELS here.) But the re-launched site places less emphasis on community interaction, for which it has struggled to find a devoted following. That functionality is still there, but it’s now a secondary concern.

"The difference from our previous site and positioning is that we were more focused on developing a hotel review community first, and establishing a hotel search engine second," VibeAgent founder Adam Healey tells me. "While we’re still developing our community, we realize that the best way to do this is to create a best-of-breed search engine first, and then enable registered users access to additional personalized functionality that incrementally improves their site experience."

Healey promises two more newsworthy announcements over the next month regarding the site’s future functionality.