Short-Term Rental and Vacation Rental News

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.

Turn on your hotel-room TV and you'll see property information. Vacation rentals will eventually get on board, too, and this is the start.

The websites that have the most comprehensive set of lodging choices, whether they are hotels, vacation rentals, apartments or igloos, will dominate. Expedia, through its HomeAway acquisition and intent to develop apartment rentals in cities, knows this and is getting ready for the future of travel in lodging.

The latest revenue numbers from Airbnb explain why Expedia is acquiring HomeAway, the Priceline Group is touting its 21 million bookable rooms, and Wall Street analysts are questioning hotel-chain CEOs on the prospect of selling hotel rooms through Airbnb.

The biggest challenge for Airbnb is the idea that staying with a stranger is strange. So Airbnb is shining a brighter spotlight on its community of hosts worldwide to inject the brand perception with a more familial enthusiasm.

Airbnb is evolving into a global movement that transcends travel because it's crafting a universal ideology that promotes positive human values wherever it does business.

Airbnb is evolving as a social network as much as a room sharing platform with services like its new Community Center page, which hosts and guests used right after the Paris attacks.