Short-Term Rental and Vacation Rental News

Hotels and the sharing economy don't compete as much as they complement one another. Understanding what makes the innovators work, though, can improve the operations of hotel chains and properties.

HomeAway, which is way behind, but pushing hard to improve its e-commerce capabilities, is beginning to feel some heat from Booking.com on one side and Airbnb on the other. You could therefore look at this follow-on public offering as a defensive move. On the other hand, HomeAway's acquisition spree is an aggressive tack, and the public offering signals that HomeAway has no intention of slowing down.

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.

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.