Short-Term Rental and Vacation Rental News

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.

With this settlement, the city has clearly said it will enforce the existing laws about short-term rentals. What this will mean for Airbnb and its peers remains to be seen, as does its effect on hosts and users .

Many people can't or don't want to pay $250 and up for a hotel room they'll only briefly use in a trendy urban neighborhood. The Freehand brand is designed for those people.

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.

Airbnb seems to almost encourage hosts, now budding entrepreneurs, to manage more than one Airbnb property by teaching hospitality skills and making it easier for them to accept bookings. Sharing is certainly big business.

Ex-hotelier Chip Conley is attempting to bring uniform standards of hospitality to the Wild West of online property sharing and half a million micro-entrepreneurs worldwide.

Priceline's Jeffery Boyd is going out -- from the CEO post, at least -- at the top, and the guy with a banker's demeanor will come to be viewed as a rock star of online and mobile travel. We don't know about groupies, but there certainly are a ton of imitators.

This will be an interesting dance for HomeAway, which clearly wants to cater more to the major players, meaning professionally managed properties.

The city is an urban playground for visitors and locals alike and we'd like to see its new leader take inspiration from his sometimes dictatorial and always opinionated predecessor.

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