Short-Term Rental and Vacation Rental News

Airbnb needs to figure out a way to work neighbors into the equation.

Hotel Urbano is now offering short-term rentals while Expedia is showing HomeAway's vacation rentals and Booking.com has lots of apartment hotels. Convergence extraordinaire.

It is interesting to see that the Travel Technology Association, which takes the online travel agency side on the hotel tax issue, is siding with members HomeAway and Airbnb on short-term rental legislation.

There are holes in the arguments of both the City of San Francisco and HomeAway. The new short-term rental law would indeed put HomeAway in the new position of collecting taxes from renters, and HomeAway could find a way in its business model to make that happen. Still, the new law does appear to favor Airbnb, which already collects fees from guests.

Airbnb's business model (3% commissions) is more host-friendly than HomeAway's (10% commissions). It's good news, except that it runs contrary to all the company's marketing messaging.

Airbnb is far past the early adopter phase, but it is just now entering the phase where its hosts and guests may not be there just for the sharing and belonging.

Airbnb is either quietly building out host services for launch or keeping tabs of the growing crop of startups, which are ripe for acquisition once their product is stabilized and customer base large.

It's smart for HomeAway to give its users more reasons to use its mobile app to improve their local experience with rides, food, and local attractions.

Not that HomeAway isn't above doing these sorts of things, but Airbnb's lobbyists sure were adept at getting a seat at the table in San Francisco.

It's a fascinating time in vacation rentals, and not just because of yesterday's news that HomeAway is suing San Francisco because of the law its city council let Airbnb write.