Hotel search site shows there’s room in the city

One floor above Hamilton’s and the bustle of the Downtown Mall, a pair of entrepreneurs sit and dream of a Silicon Valley of the South.

They’ve been doing their part to make that happen. VibeAgent has burst forth from the Batten Business Incubator and into its own as an international company based in Charlottesville.

As Adam Healey and Charles Seilheimer tweak their site to interest more of the travel market, they are hoping to put Charlottesville on the map as a tech-friendly city.

“A lot of businesses are flying under the radar screen,” Healey said. “Charlottesville has a lot of potential — it’s a university town with good engineering and business schools … the people, money and environment lay a nice foundation for a strong technology company.”

Gary Henry, a member of the board of directors for the Charlottesville Business Innova-tion Council, said he believes Charlottesville hasn’t hit a critical mass of technology businesses.

“When there is a critical mass, it’s hard not to run into someone in your field,” Henry said. “Even though the economy is going through a period of uncertainty, there still is quite a bit of money to invest in promising goods and services. There still is a huge demand for technology.”

Healey and Seilheimer, 2005 graduates of the University of Virginia Darden Graduate School of Business Administra-tion, were inspired to create VibeAgent because many of their friends would ask them for hotel recommendations. The site allows visitors to narrow their search for hotels by the ambience, amenities, neighborhoods and other criteria.

VibeAgent shows the room prices from 30 different sites such as Priceline.com and the hotel itself. Users make reservations at the third-party sites; VibeAgent makes its money through a commission paid by those agents.

VibeAgent 1.0 was launched in November at PhoCusWright. The large travel conference will see the newest version of the site launch later this year. VibeAgent has already undergone a redesign to add features such as dateless searching.

“We get a lot of feedback from users,” Seilheimer said. “That goes into the product development process. We also have a lot of ideas in-house and the ability to innovate.”

VibeAgent’s creators have run into some surprises since the site has opened up, such as interest from hotels.

“They wanted to control the photos and descriptions of the hotel,” Healey said. “We’re about to launch an extranet where the hotels can control their own content in the site.”

However, user reviews won’t be part of any changes. VibeAgent’s social networking aspect allows users to review places they’ve stayed and see which hotels their friends recommend. People who don’t want to take advantage of the social networking feature can still read what other people think about the hotels.

Although VibeAgent was refocused as a hotel search engine last month, the co-founders say it’s still a fundamental part of the site. The “hotel search engine” term better fits what VibeAgent does for its 50,000 monthly visitors.

“We’re just providing people with a useful service — narrowing down where to stay,” Seilheimer said.

The company is attracting investors who see the value of the service. A year ago, TRX head Trip Davis signed on to be VibeAgent’s angel investor. Although Healey and Seilheimer won’t say who’s involved in the latest round of financing, they have said it’s almost fully closed.

VibeAgent has had to expand its staff to keep up with the site. The company has seven employees in Charlottesville and another seven in Bangalore, India, where employees develop software and perform other tasks. Healey said the company is looking to hire more local employees to do marketing communications and Web development and design.

Those employees will have their work cut out for them. The co-founders are hoping to debut VibeAgent in different languages in one to two years, and continue to work on product development and operational infrastructure. But when they have a moment, VibeAgent employees take a break and play Wii Sports.

“We play every day,” Healey said. “We work hard and play hard.”