Oh I didn’t realize rooms could be put on that one, or is it just entire places?
Might be TripAdvisor. Expedia owns VRBO.
But Tripadvisor died when they got greedy and raised service fees to 20% or higher. I haven’t even had an inquiry from them for over 2 years.
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Yes, Expedia owns VRBO (and Trivago, Hotwire, Travelocity, Orbitz, Expedia & Hotels.com) but you can advertise separately on those sites with your rental even if you already advertise with VRBO. When you advertise directly with Expedia it is very similar to Booking.com (hotel-oriented, huge reach, high commissions).
But yes, I was referring to TripAdvisor which ten years ago worked for us very well. The past few years we get maybe 3-4 bookings a year from them.
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I heard Google Travel now offers a search for Vacation Rentals (https://www.google.com/travel/), I also noticed that none of the listings that show up come from Airbnb, Booking or Vrbo, but I see plenty of listings from Tripadvisor, Rentalsunited and a few more…
Anyone try getting their listings to show up on the Google Travel search?
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As a former excursion operator I got my real start from a great TripAdvisor review in 2009, when travel crashed after the 2008 junk bond disaster. I lived and died by my 5 star reviews for 10 years, but the last 3 they were going downhill. Instead of putting their top rated tours first on the page, they now put the ones they book at the top of the page, with “book now” buttons. I couldn’t use their booking system because of the way my tours were structured, so my reviews were near the bottom.
I think they lost a lot of credibility as a review site when they started buying online travel booking companies. I use it mostly for restaurant reviews when I travel, since they police their reviews unlike Yelp.
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No white space makes reading it on a phone painful.
I’ve never understood people who want to share but then do a text dump meant only for them. If it is too difficult to read, the OP doesn’t really want any feedback about the content.
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Some of us regulars have been “schooled” too!
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thanks I realised bookings.com were pretty useless for STR and cancelled my account also before I even had my first booking. They obviously are not organized, do not put any $$ into their website which is old clunky and full of time wasting inefficiencies like a government website !
I think there is room for a new STR company that is the ‘lyft’ to airbnb as ‘Uber’.
Has anyone tried flipkey ? I was going to try that next …
BDC is the marketleader for STR, currently 90% of my platform bookings are coming from them.
Seems AirBNB completely lost a bit of momentum. Guests are very hesitant to hand over their money upfront to AirBnB. They prefer to pay on arrival.
Also a lot of people still see AirBnB as some scruffy homesharing/couch surfing site. And are scared to end up in some illegal hotel in a run-down neighborhood. They see BDC as more professional and less risk.
You should also tell hosterposter that you run a small hotel in Austria. BDC does much better in the EU and having multiple listings in a building isn’t the same as listing one home or a private suite in a home. It also depends on what’s important to the host. Some people don’t like that guests don’t have reviews or they don’t like that they don’t have complete control over their ad copy.
Tourism in my area started as renting out a spare room. Most often the kids had their own room during winter, but had to give it up and share a room with their siblings during summer.
We still have a lot of private rooms, boarding houses and b&b’s around here.
What AirBnB “invented” already existed for centuries in Europe.
Reviews are overrated, they give a false sense of security. I have seen both ways, very good guest with previous 3 star ratings, and bad guests with 5 stars. There will always be bad apples.
For me the platform that gives me the most revenue is the best.
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And maybe that’s why it does so well in the US. Americans love things stolen from other cultures and rebranded as our own.
In any case, anecdotally, it seems that Airbnb is the best platform by your measure in the US.
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All fair points.
In my case I do not rent a whole house just a room and bookings.com does not seem set up for that and seems to cater more for full apt or house vacation rentals. In addition BDC has a dated an inflexible website.
I still thing there is room for a new STR website/company
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In addition to Airbnb, I set up on VRBO a couple months ago, had one booking that was cancelled.
Now someone is asking to stay for 2 weeks and on Air my maximum is 1 week. In research, looks like VRBO won’t allow you to set maximum days. This is ridiculous and I tried to send a nice reply to the inquiry as to why I can’t be available for 2 weeks.
Does anyone know how to set maximum nights?
Contact support, it’s what we did initially with Vrbo and BDC, although we now set maximum days via our channel manager.
JF
I just contacted them and they said there isn’t a way to limit number of days.
I also have issues with inquiries and no information about who the guest is.
Don’t like shooting in the dark, so I’m not going to stay on their site.
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So, about 10 days ago after getting an inquiry on VRBO for 2 weeks and not being able to set a limit I cancelled with VRBO. Never got a response from the guest when I suggested booking with me for a week, not two.
So, my account was cancelled and today I get a bizarre response from the person wanting to be here for two weeks telling me he and his wife would really like to stay but he would have to pay through his company. Could I please send my address, blah, blah, blah.
Fortunately from reading things here I knew this was not good news, told him I couldn’t do it then sent his request along to VRBO.
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Unfortunately, you closed your VRBO account because of a scammer. They request longer bookings to entice hosts to accept the booking. I had one of those request a month at full prices in high season (over $20,000US).
One way to limit the stay on Vrbo is to put the 2-week limit in as a house rule (you are allowed three rules in addition to a contract), then require guests to “request to book” instead of instant book. If anyone requests more than the limit, simply point them towards the house rule and tell them to change their request to be within the limit or withdraw their request in order to get their money back quickly.
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Odd, however it wouldn’t have been Vrbo per se that we dealt with, it would have been Homeaway as this was 3/4 years ago, before the big rebrand.
JF
On Air my maximum nights are 7. The person I talked to on the phone with VRBO said there wasn’t a way to limit number of nights, not helpful.
This scammer really freaked me out. Have never had that happen with Air. I’ll just go along with Air until I figure out something else.