Short-Term Rental and Vacation Rental News

Don't downplay the importance of intangibles and narratives in the online travel business. Expedia won 2015. Booking.com won't sit back in 2016. In this transitional year in online travel and lodging on so many levels, you can expect that Booking.com will be heard from.

We can't wait until Airbnb goes public so we can finally get some transparency and stop hearing about hosts trying to make ends meet. It's so much more sophisticated than that.

Clearstone Venture Partners claims that funding LeisureLink is a better investment than in Airbnb or HomeAway. That may be a frivolous boast but what's clear is that a lot of people are going to make a ton of money on the business and distribution side of the vacation rental and alternative lodging industry.

It is very attractive for Booking.com to abstain from charging travelers a booking fee on vacation rentals. But the lack thereof means Booking.com's commissions may not be competitive and shareholders will likely demand that Booking.com maximize the revenue opportunity and impose the booking fee.

Airbnb, in theory, could ease some cities' opposition to its business by giving landlords a revenue share of their tenants' rentals. It's an interesting idea, albeit with tons of hurdles.

The 10 most popular cities for Airbnb rentals on New Year's Eve account for about 27% of total guests.

25 Moments that Mattered in 2015: To make our selection of 25 moments, we thought back to the stories that drove reader engagement and sparked discussion among both travel experts and the general public. Some stories were quick blips that represented bigger things while others were narratives that built slowly through out the year. Each one, though, spoke to where we are right now when it comes to the big business of global travel.

Consider the big changes ahead for HomeAway, including making its listings online bookable, supplementing subscription fees with commission payments, introducing a booking fee for travelers and getting integrated with Expedia. When you further take into account competition from Airbnb, Booking.com, TripAdvisor and a bevy of local rivals, there is a helluva lot of risk ahead.

TripAdvisor's decision to expand travelers' fees for vacation rentals will please Wall Street and could put pressure on Booking.com, which adamantly eschews such fees, to do likewise.

Airbnb has an ample amount of privately raised cash to burn. That whole IPO thing is still on the agenda but off in the future.