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 Tips for Choosing a Hotel
Get the Best Hotel Room
Traveler Tested: Vayama.com
 Share Your Thoughts on VibeAgent.com!
 Choosing a hotel is one of the most personal parts of planning a trip. Unlike booking a flight -- where generally a seat is a seat is a seat, no matter how much you pay -- selecting your hotel involves many factors, including location, price, amenities, ambience, service, cleanliness and more. And of course, every traveler wants something a little different.
One of the most popular ways to sort through all of your options is to read hotel reviews from other travelers -- but how do you know whether those travelers will have the same preferences you do?
Enter VibeAgent.com, a new hotel booking site that combines hotel reviews with social networking to help you find just the right accommodations. Unlike many other hotel review sites, VibeAgent lets members create detailed profiles of themselves -- including a photo and bio -- so that you can see the person behind each review and decide whether to trust his or her judgment. The site also offers a sophisticated system of search filters and a booking engine that searches rates on 29 different hotel sites.
Is VibeAgent the answer to your hotel booking challenges? Well, probably not -- at least not yet. Read on for our full review.
 The Basics
After about a year in beta mode, VibeAgent made its official debut in November 2007. It's billed as "the first and only site that combines user-generated hotel reviews, meta-search, and social networking to provide its users with free personalized hotel recommendations and booking at the best available rates." The site lists over 120,000 hotels worldwide.
In addition to letting you search by city and travel dates, the site also allows users to specify a preferred hotel "vibe" by selecting tags from three categories: Ambience, Activities and Recommended For. Search results are ranked according to the site's unique "VibeIndex." When you're ready to book, VibeAgent checks rates from several providers; you then follow a link to the provider of your choice to book your hotel.
 Competitors
The giant in the hotel reviews field is TripAdvisor, listing more than 10 million user-generated reviews. However, major booking engines such as Travelocity and Orbitz have recently added reviews from their own members, and other smaller sites such as MyTravelGuide and TravelPost.com also focus on hotel reviews.
Of these, only TripAdvisor has attempted the sort of social networking functions that VibeAgent offers, with its new Traveler Network. TravelPost.com does not have this networking capability, but does offer information about its reviewers to help travelers weigh the usefulness of each review.
Test Drive
How It Stacks Up: I tried four different test cases to see how well VibeAgent lived up to its mission of providing personalized hotel recommendations and great rates. For comparative purposes, we tested the same scenarios on three major competitors: Travelocity, TripAdvisor and TravelPost.com.
I started by signing up for VibeAgent membership, an easy and straightforward process. After writing a quick bio, I could either upload a photo of myself or choose a predesigned avatar; this image would show up on any reviews or comments I posted on the site. You do not need to sign up for VibeAgent membership to search for hotels, and in fact I found that it made very little difference in how useful -- or not -- my results were.
My first test was to find a centrally located New York City hotel on a budget: $250 a night. I typed "New York" into the search box and hit "Search Deals Now!" Before VibeAgent took me to my results, it gave me following message: "Fuhgeddaboutit -- New York is huge!" I was then given the opportunity to narrow down my choices by neighborhood. (VibeAgent currently offers this option for only a select few large cities, including London, Paris and Rome -- but not Chicago, Los Angeles, Sydney, Tokyo or Las Vegas.)
I checked off every Manhattan option, eliminating airports and other boroughs, and continued to my search results. Of the 293 hotels listed, the first few were over $400 a night, well outside my $250 budget. VibeAgent allows you to filter your results based on price, but unfortunately its range only goes from $0 to $180+ -- so if I wanted to eliminate the $400-a-night places, I'd also have to eliminate many of the hotels that were within my budget. And in an expensive city like New York, the difference between a $250 hotel and a $160 one could mean the difference between "cheap and cheerful" and "roach motel."
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