Skift Take
With the likes of Airbnb playing up the sheer number of properties available, it makes sense for Wyndham to make a point of some of the advantages you get when booking direct with a company.
The vacation rental market has undergone a seismic realignment since the twin juggernauts of HomeAway and Airbnb bounded onto the scene in the mid 2000s.
Both companies — operating with slightly different models — helped to shift consumer expectations when it came to taking a holiday in someone else's house.
So what do you do if you are a legacy business working in that environment today?
According to Gail Mandel, CEO of Wyndham Vacation Rentals, the key is educating the public on the biggest differences among companies operating in the space.
“I think that the biggest challenges that we've seen is that [there are] some of the newer models that are still catching up from a regulatory standpoint, so there's a little bit of confusion by the consumers about professionally managed versus the listings model," she told Skift.
If you type in “Airbnb horror stories” into Google, you get plenty of hits. That’s the tradeoff for having 2 million listings and 60 million customers: sometimes things are going to go wrong.
Wyndham, meanwhile, is a fraction of the size with more than 100,000 properties across the globe. It takes roug
