Homeaway's geographic limits are out of control

I just checked my VRBO listing and put in some open dates I have in August. Over the last few months they have been increasing my geographic area.

Now I really have zero idea how many are really listed under my city. At one point there were a whopping 13 of us! - that’s not a typo. Then it went to 81 and so on. Of course many of the properties being pulled in are up to one hour away.

But today…I see there are 145 rentals for the dates from August. So then I punched in a couple of dates in January and 245 rentals show up!

Out of the 245 listed…you don’t see me until you get to the page that shows 151-200 listings. I am so far down the list because I do not use their payment system or alternative payments. So HA can’t collect a service fee from my guests.

I wonder how this will play out in the long run. Will travelers get so frustrated because they can’t find a place where they really want to be? Are travelers even confirming distances or are they just entering in reservation requests?

While I understand that the sites want the traveler to book any property instead of leaving the site altogether…when will they just abandon the search and move onto a hotel?

I can’t tell if Air is mixing up all the properties like this. I know they are pulling in 300 properties and mine still shows as one of the first in my area. But I can’t tell from many of the listings if they are really in my city or not.

I don’t click on map features and zoom in, etc. when I am searching for places. I just expect that if I punch in the name of a city, then at least those will appear first, and then maybe places further away will appear towards the end. I really hope I am in the minority. What is such a shame is that someone wants to be in my area and they end up booking some place 30 minutes down the road.

Using VRBO/HA to find a place in Costa Rica I started with the whole country and used the map to zero in on listings near a beach.

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Yes, but I think the zoom feature works best if you use a different browser in private mode. Otherwise, for some reason, not all properties show up. History, cache, etc. skews the results?

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Okay…I just tried using the map feature on VRBO. This may sound like a stupid question but is it mostly used if you know exactly what attraction you might want to be near? Or maybe you know you want to be within 2 blocks of the beach, etc?

For example: I just zoomed in to the neighboring town and it went from 378 rentals to 30…lol. If I were booking a place in that town I would only use filters as far as number of bedrooms, if I need to be on the lake, pets, etc. But I would have NO idea what I would be looking for on the map feature unless I already knew that city like the back of my hand.

Is this how you guys use it? Please enlighten me :slight_smile:

It is a disaster since the buy out from expedia. They will rotate you in and out if you arent paying an annual fee, and they will hide your listing if you arent using their payments. There is nothing good going on there. Log into their owner forum and you will find out a lot more. Even the zoom feature does not show all the listings.

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It’s a shame all the listing sites seem to be headed in this direction. I do read HA forum daily to keep up with all the shenanigans, and it’s so sad to watch some posters on there still thinking HA is caring about them…lol.

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Disaster is a good word for it. HomeAway/VRBO has so many conflicting algorithms working against each other that search results are a total mess. Not much better at Airbnb. I have lots of competition from PM’s that are allowed to use their website and even their phone number in their profile picture. WTH?

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