Interesting Article from tnooz.com on Vacation Rentals websites

Valyn Perini on tnooz.com has posted this fantastic article on Vacation Rentals websites and is well worth a read.

Some of the highlights that relate to real-time booking:

Real-time booking

It's still very rare to come across real-time on-line booking for vacation rentals, but it's happening more and more often on management company websites (I never saw it offered by individual owners).

And it's a blessing. If I'm willing to take the risk of booking online (like I do for hotels or resorts) after viewing your beautiful site with lots of photos and information, let me. Please.

It's clear this is one of the reasons the vacation rental industry suffers from an occupancy rate in the 30s instead of in the 70s like the hotel industry.

Make the product easier to buy and more people will buy it. Make it hard to buy and watch your customers go to a resort.

The primary challenge is obvious - hundreds of thousands of suppliers worldwide. Aggregating hundreds of thousands of units of inventory is hard but HomeAway is working on it, buying vacation rental sites around the world at a good clip.

It's one thing to have the inventory in one place, but quite another to have it presented in a standard, useful and bookable way.

I expect to have a wonderful time on my trip, but I don't expect to see much increase in the occupancy numbers of the vacation rental industry if the industry doesn't make their product easier to understand and easier to book.

Read the full article.