Vibe Expands Under Radar in EU, APAC

Company: Vibe

Headquarters: Stevenage, Hertfordshire, U.K. 

CEO: Steve Barrass 

Nearly 20 years after its birth as an internal travel booking tool for a travel business, travel technology provider Vibe has grown into a platform processing more than £1 billion in transactions annually across 38 countries—and it's ready to continue its "careful" expansion strategy. 

The Vibe platform was launched in 2007 for P&P Group, which included corporate-travel-focused Chelsea Village Travel, because, as co-founder and chief commercial officer Martin Eade put it, "We couldn't quite get a technology product that fitted what we needed. Fortunately, we had the capabilities to build it ourselves." 

After the first site was launched on the platform, for U.K.-based supermarket chain ASDA's travel business, Eade said he was fielding requests to license the technology, which the team did to a few smaller companies. Eventually, rather than face the decision to license the technology to competitors, it spun off as its own separate business. 

Leisure travel was Vibe's focus at first, but corporate travel has been a growing part of the business. It was working with a small Yorkshire-based corporate agency, NYS, when it was acquired by Capita Travel and Events, which ended up moving a large majority of its users to the Vibe platform, Eade said. It's more recently added large corporate travel clients including TMC consortium Advantage Travel Partnership, Travel Counsellors for Business and Identity Travel. 

Eades said now corporate is Vibe's fastest growing business, with the split about 60 percent leisure and 40 percent corporate, with its major competitors on the corporate side being Atriis and, to a degree, Spotnana. 

Both its corporate and leisure customers are managed from a single code base, meaning "most of the development on the Vibe platform gets rolled back to the entire client base for free," Eades said. Each client's deployment also tends to include specialized capabilities to meet those clients' needs. For Travel Counsellors, for example, Vibe had to build an omnichannel system that allowed different storefronts to all be managed and controlled from the head office. 

As such, as Vibe has been growing, particularly in Europe and the Asia/Pacific region, it is selective about which clients it adds. 

"We've been very careful about expansion, not taking on too much," Eade said. "There has to be some sort of synergies, with clients doing something a little different, not wanting an off-the shelf platform." 

Vibe now has a new opportunity for corporate business expansion with its recent launch of a Model Context Protocol server, which lets travelers book and manage travel through their preferred AI platforms, including ChatGPT, Claude and Microsoft Copilot. That way, TMCs can offer clients AI travel search without having to build their own AI infrastructure. 

While Vibe builds technology with both its leisure and corporate clients in mind, Eade said the corporate side is really the "sweet spot" in terms of booking through AI tools. U.K.-based TMC ITG Business Travel is the first client live with the technology and is testing it with corporate clients. 

"An end user trusts the TMC already," he said. "They've got the service levels, all the agreements, the fee structure and the ability to connect." 

Vibe also is working on an MCP focused specifically on the staff of travel agencies rather than customers, Vibe co-founder and chief technical officer Matthew Chapman said. The layer will check to make sure that booking details are correct, such as the transfers are the right time and the hotel reservation dates match the travel dates. 

"It's basically a [quality assurance] robot using AI," he said. "We're building an MCP server for them so they can get all of the booking data and run that automatically." 

As clients generally use the Vibe technology under their own name and branding, the name might not be as well known in the corporate travel space as the branded booking tools, Eade said. Selling tools directly to corporate customers, however, is not something that is on the company's roadmap, he said. 

"Our focus today is on giving TMCs the tools they need to compete and grow," Eade said. "That's where we're investing our energy. The corporate market is always evolving, so we'll continue to assess opportunities over time, but our priority right now is helping our partners succeed."