What's the easiest way to find a vacation rental?
I've rented a few vacation homes and really liked it but it always takes hours and hours to find a good one. It seems like there are 100+ different sites that all list different homes (some with a lot and some with fewer nicer ones) and I keep thinking I'll find the perfect spot on the next site.
Is there a Kayak or Expedia for vacation rentals (I did try Vamoose, but that was terrible)?
Best Answer
There are many thousands of vacation rental websites. HomeAway is the largest player in the industry and owns 31 of these sites, but there are thousands of more sites, making it really hard to see all the rental choices for a town in one place.
The solution to that is a search engine that searches the vacation rental sites for you (like Kayak for flights). There are a number of these search engines out there, each offering a different user experience:
Full disclosure: I built Otalo to solve just this problem of searching through different vacation rentals sites with a single search (like Kayak for flights).
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What is the best site to search for vacation rentals?
The Best Vacation Rental Sites- Airbnb.
- Booking.com.
- Expedia.
- HometoGo.
- Hotels.com.
- Tripadvisor.
- Tripping.
- Vrbo.
What is the largest vacation rental site?
The largest vacation rental site, Airbnb gives you access to more than 6 million unique places to stay in more than 100,000 cities and 191 countries and regions. It's also one of the most user-friendly booking interfaces. Booking.com has access to over 27 million vacation rental options worldwide.What is Plum guide?
Plum Guide is a relatively new vacation rental website that offers a curated selection of vacation homes and apartments that can be booked online. The company launched in 2016 and is based in London.How do I choose my VRBO?
10 Tips To Select the Perfect VRBO PropertyRnbstylerz \u0026 AREES - WHAT
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Answer 2
Almost all of the vacation rental sites are owned by the same company (HomeAway, which just went public, by the way) and many of them are literally using the same software and searching the same database. It's a hard problem in general because there are so many vacation rentals on the market and they're all different, unique, individual flowers.
Answer 3
Answer 4
I have good experiences with AirBnb and Only appartments. Having said that, I also have the impression that the more standard the search engine get, the more standard the offers get as well.
In my opinion the easiest way to find a vacation rental is by exactly doing, what you are doing. It is my impression that the beauty of a vacation rental lies mostly in the obscurity in which it is hidden. Whenever you get a Kayak-like service for vacation rentals, you will get standardized results, whereas when an owner takes the effort to create its own website (how quirky the html layout may look), the same effort is then put in offering you a good and well taken care of vacation rental.
So my generalized opinion is that the more old fashioned contacting the owners get, the better the location. Furthermore, you will be supporting local economy in contrast to multi national search engine.
Personal I see the hours of searching for a vacation rental as being part of the fun.
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