Articles tagged “vacation rentals”

Dubai has the opportunity to become an example of how cities can gain control of their currently unregulated rental markets while strengthening their tourism offerings.

In a turning point for Booking.com and the hospitality industry, the largest lodging site in the world now has so many vacation rental listings, dispersed across 193 destinations, that it is changing the nature of the online travel business.

The Vacation Rental Management Association doesn't have the digital savvy or clout to forge a new set of business relationships between professional managers on the one hand, and online travel agencies and vacation rental sites such as HomeAway, on the other. Too little, and way too late.

HomeAway's history is rollups in the vacation rental space, from around the globe. It has this down.

By launching this new luxury site, HomeAway is leveraging existing assets and tweaking them a bit with a dose of curation. Given the rise of vacation clubs and the supposed boom in luxury travel, this move makes a lot of sense.

The presence of established players such as HomeAway and TripAdvisor, plus a market that isn't as addressable as it might appear, will make the vacation rental startup sector the next bubble.

If Expedia was worried about angering hotels by pushing into vacation rentals, the cat is now officially out of the bag. Another factor behind the Expedia-HomeAway deal is that Booking.com has been making inroads in the U.S. with its 356,000 properties, and Expedia is hungering for more supply.

Expedia's focus will remain with hotels for the forseeable future, but this pilot partnership with HomeAway on vacation rentals is the very beginning of what could be a dramatic change.

Airbnb's current stance would likely be much different if its path to an IPO was uncluttered by web of local and state laws that could trip it up.

When the vacation rental site encourages you to eat like a local, they also mean you're going to need to cook and shop like one too.