What are the biggest and most famous vacation rental sites besides Airbnb? VRBO? Homestay? Tripadvisor?
Add booking.com - they now offer vacation rentals. And “HomeAway”, which is really the same as VRBO.
We list on the three you mention except “Homestay”. We get two-thirds of our bookings from VRBO (a few of those are really from HomeAway). Tripadvisor has destroyed their vacation rental business by having outrageous service fees (they tried to charge a potential guest of ours $1400 US on a $4500 US booking).
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Booking is by far the largest, followed by Expedia, together they cover about 80% of the market.
AirBnB is still a dwarf compared to those.
I do not know who is the big player in the US. But booking is very big in Europa and Asia.
So if you want to advertise on the European and Asian (East and West) market, booking is very good.
Booking and Expedia both have a 10+ Billion yearly revenue, AirBnB does merely 2, so that gives you an idea of how big they are on the global market.
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Booking is a hotel search engine (although there are some apartments on the site and they have their own homestay section). I was more thinking of Airbnb similar sites where you’ll find mostly properties rented by private people
No, Booking dot com is not “just a hotel search engine”. You have to create an account there. They have mostly hotels, but are trying to expand into vacation rentals.
The big ones for renting vacation homes are VRBO/HomeAway (and all their associated websites) and TripAdvisor (used to be FlipKey).
That is a misconception.
This has been on this forum before: AirBnB did not invent private rentals.
Booking had private rentals/homestay long before AirBnB existed, they just did not make a separate category for them until people started thinking AirBnB was the only place for private rentals and homestay.
Lots of private owners in my area list on booking, and they get lots of business trough them.
If you really want worldwide exposure, booking is the place to be.
www.IdyCabins.com Hehe, well it is the best site for ME!
seriously create your own booking site and at least get your repeats to book direct.
RR
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What is the best way to set up the fee process on VRBO? Per booking? And is it comparable to Airbnb?
@Drea - I don’t know what you mean by the “fee” process? Are you asking what kind of account you should create: subscription or pay-per-booking?
Many people create a pay-per-booking listing to get started, so it’s free until you actually get a booking, like AirBnB.
We have a subscription. Our price range is $400 to $850 US per night (three bedroom, whole-house rental in the Caribbean) and we get 70% of our bookings from VRBO/HomeAway.
I find the AirBnB guests to be much more price sensitive than VRBO guests. AirBnB shoppers are looking for discounts or short stays below the minimum or trying to cram a lot of people in above our maximum of six.