So there was much bemusement at last week's Hotelicopter April Fool stunt - a helicopter transformed into, er, hotel. Geddit!
Anyway, those wags at Vibeagent.com - the US hotel search engine and creators of the video - actually had something far more substantial up their sleeves.
In fact, Hotelicopter is the new Vibeagent. Yes, indeed.
The new offering has a raft of new bits of functionality including what it claims is the first travel site to include Facebook Connect and aggregates reviews, pictures and video from partner sites.
The old vibeagent.com will be redirected to hotelicopter.com...
The decision to get a bit of buzz going with the April Fool joke seems pretty inspired to us.
The Youtube video has been watched by over 300,000 people, national media in the UK and the US named it as one of the best April Fools of the day, and people were talking about it.
Vibeagent/Hotelicopter founder/CEO Adam Healey told us on Monday night that the decision to switch brands was "pretty easy".
"We wanted to do a few different things. We realised that there's a huge opportunity in the hotel vertical. There was also a huge SEO benefit from the name," he said.
So fair play to Healey et al for having a go at something new and for coming up with something completely different in terms of a promotional push.
Lots more on the Hotelicopter blog.
UPDATE: One VERY unhappy punter.
Very clever way to get a bit of free publicity. But I'm at a loss to work out what Hotelicopter does that a zillion other metasearch engines don't?
This is a really brave move from Adam. Risky tough. Unless the brand VibeAgent never really took off.
We saw already some changes in the VibeAgent UI in the past 6 months, but maybe changing brand totally is worth a try to start (almost) from scratch with new functionalities.
Of course, I am a bit disappointed not to feature among the top reviewers. My ego (sigh!) I guess.
Anyway, it would be nice to watch the evolution of this new hotel search engine and more importantly see some tough competition against TripAdvisor, Kayak, HotelCombined and other hotel search engines.