Listing sites and their hidden charges for travellers

[Felicity]

Lisa - I am pleased to hear you are having success with renting through Airbnb - the only serious enquiry I had through there was put off by the booking fee. I had to go through a verification process and I require that my renters do too.

The reason you have found cheaper rentals on there is most likely the kind of set up you have chosen and it is likely that they do not advertise anywhere else, with attendant subscription costs. This would be owners who for reasons of work or something else are not using their home all the time and want to make a bit of money renting out the empty space. Letting is not their livelihood - it is welcome addition to their income so they don't NEED to run it as a business although of course there are many who are professional in the way they do it so I am not knocking the casual owner. I would be very surprised if you found the exact same place on VRBO and AirBnB and the latter was cheaper? However, this may all change when they are both charging booking fees. They will probably choose the one which has the least impact, percentage-wise, on owner and renter, on the total.

 

[Roz]

Kathy, thanks for the detailed info on theluberon.com -- interesting setup.

I have used VRBO successfully quite a bit in the past. But I am concerned about Expedia taking it over, and charging additional booking fees for renters. And I agree with Lisa and Felicity that under its current setup the name "by owner" is very misleading.

 

[Pauline]

I am searching for a cottage in the Cotswolds and have come up with a good example of these service fees. (@Felicity 's Cotswold cottage is booked for the week I want or I would have rented it - we have seen the cottage and it is beautiful.)

Honeysuckle Cottage, Oddington - 1 week in June
Manor Cottages - 1 week £662
AirBnB - 1 week £720 + £107 service fee = £827
Owner - Chris. If you click thru to his profile, he works for Manor Cottages.

That is a difference of £165!!

I do not find Manor Cottage properties on HomeAway, but when I look through the HomeAway properties, most are with agencies, not with individual owners. British holiday destination are served by more vacation rental agencies that most places. When I look at HomeAway for France, I don't come across as many properties that are represented by agencies.

 

[Felicity]

Interesting example, Pauline. I looked at his listing and pretended to book because I was curious to know what it meant by *not including extras. I don't think he merely meant a credit card processing fee. Perhaps a cleaning fee? A security deposit? I never did find out because the page went to an error page. Did you do a test 'nearly' booking? Nice cottage though. The basic price is more because he is trying to cover the 3% AirBnB charge him. Although that would only be about £20 charge to him but then he has to pay another 2% perhaps to be processed by PayPal or it might be nearer 4% depending on where the credit card originates and that is on the total after AirbnB add their service fee. I add a bit on to my AirbnB prices but not that much as I am not paying a subscription and one can't expect something for nothing!

Very sorry I am booked up for your time. That would have been nice!

 

[Chris]

Here's another property owner upset by the changes at the big listing sites. (I've never rented from him, but I have read and enjoyed his blog for years.)

 

[Lisa in Ottawa]

Thanks Chris. That was very interesting and depressing. I think less and less private holiday homeowners have their own website which makes it increasingly difficult to do as the blogger suggests.

 

[Chris]

It makes me think it would be a good time to go into business setting up good websites for holiday homeowners...

 

[Pauline]

In the old days (1990s) the agencies (small and large) owned the vacation rental market. Big glossy catalogs and you booked through them. US agencies marketed properties handled by local agencies. When we traveled I wrote down any information I could find about local agencies - so you could book with them instead of through the big US or British agencies (to save money and to do the booking with the people you ended up dealing with when you were there). That was how I started SlowTrav - with my lists of local agencies.

Then in the early 2000s the Rent from Owner websites started to change things - you could deal directly with the owner. HomeAway bought up all the good Rent from Owner sites in the mid 2000's. Many of the smaller Rent from Owner websites went out of business. Agencies started listing their properties on HomeAway because people abandoned the agencies. Even the large agency Interhome, who has been around for a long time, has many of their properties on HomeAway. Many agencies have gone out of business.

Now the Rent from Owner websites like HomeAway (and the ones it owns) and Trip Advisor (and the ones it owns) need to make more money! So they charge more for listings and now will charge for bookings. And they run Google Ads on their website for more money!

I think another big change is coming but am not sure what it is. Owners can have their own websites but they won't be found easily in Google especially for wide searches like "vacation rental italy". The Rent from Owner websites and the large agencies do whatever they have to to get on those first pages of Google search results.

I used to be a fan of local agencies, but I am no longer so devoted. Many are not what they used to be (except for some which are still good). I felt that with an agency you got a better representation of a property because they represented many and not just one, but now all they know is the words in their listings - they don't know the properties. You do better talking to the owner.

As @Chris suggested above, maybe it is time that the power is returned to the owner. But how?

The vacation rental market used to be small but now it is much bigger. I remember when it was difficult to find a renting in a town in Italy - now it is easy. I guess that is the upside for travelers.

 

[Chris]

It is really fascinating how things have changed over the years. I think the big guys aim more for the broad market, so there may still be room for small agencies or rent-by-owner sites for specific areas. theluberon.com comes up at the top of google searches for luberon vacation rentals, ahead of vrbo, homeaway, and all the rest. I don't really know whether he works as an agency or rent-by owner. Kathy would know, since she lists her Bonnieux apartment on that site. He used to run a small forum for vacation rental owners but I can't remember the name of it now.

 

[Roz]

Chris, thanks for the link to that article. I especially liked this quote: "We hope you'll begin to look at us as the holiday equivalent of the farmers' market, and will choose to buy from us directly rather than from the hypermarket with its 72 brands of butter. Not only will you pay less for your holiday, but you'll be supporting small local businesses at the same time."

But it is very hard to figure out the best way to do that -- especially now that sites like this are being supplanted by Facebook, so there is even less sharing of personal traveler information in an easy-to-reference format.

 

[Felicity]

It is really hard to find the small sites and the individual listings for an area and I doubt many have the patience to trawl through multiple pages of google. The world truly has been taken over by booking.com for hotels - I struggle now to find their own individual websites, sometimes to be found on page 3 or beyond but it can be done. Recently I just gave up and booked a hotel in Passau through booking.com and then felt massively guilty as I found their website days later and knew that they were paying booking about 15% of their income. Also, to add insult to injury although booking was cheaper it was only by 3 euros and for the difference the hotel was offering full breakfast for two!

Now the world is being taken over by TripAdvisor and Homeaway for self catering accommodation. Are there no laws of anti-competitiveness in the USA? Surely they must be infringing by decimating the competition? It is great that Kathy has the Luberon site. I am sure it is very well run as I 'know' Paolo from being a member of his excellent owner's forum. A comment by someone on the Homeaway site forum (this was the end part of a long diatribe) shows me that there is common fear that Expedia are all for protecting the hotel industry and are buying out the listing sites in order to destroy - is that too far fetched?? This comment is aimed at the homeowners reading the forum. He/she sounds even more bitter and twisted than me!

"Expedia (now HA) is not your fan, partner, friend, or customer. They exists for the Hotels that work with them and they want to make it harder and more expensive to rent your place and make it cheaper to book a hotel. This is corporate greed at it's finest. Have you ever seen a company purchase another company for 3.8B and within months completely change it's business model. No company changes a profitable working model this quickly without some other alternative motive behind the decision. After 7 years of supporting HA by listing on their site, they have decide I am not their customer, the traveler is now and they are no longer providing me with a site that I find helpful or useful, So I will not be renewing my listings. A business who truly wanted my business would not treat it's customers this way"

 

[Chris]

What is the name of Paolo's owners' forum, Felicity? I used to read it regularly when I was taking care of the classifieds on slowtrav.com, and now I can't think of the name.

 

[Lisa in Ottawa]

This is all rather depressing. I'm convinced eventually Uber will take over the earth. How different is this from Amazon forcing the closure of so many small independent bookstores? Facebook where now if you don't have a FB account you can't find anything. Many vacation rental owners now advertise on FB and I don't have an account and will not get one.

However, Uber is my latest pet peeve. For years as travelers we were told, make sure you get into a regulated taxi, make sure the meter is on, make sure the driver's identity is visible. Now, it's anything goes. No regulation whatsoever. Bigger and bigger. Swallowing everything in sight.

Ok, that's my rant but it's all connected from Expedia to Uber.

 

[Pauline]

I am with you on Uber @Lisa in Ottawa . Especially in London where the taxi drivers take very detailed training.

This is why I was dedicated to small, local agencies for so long. I felt they were well placed to rent me good places because they knew the owners and the area. I thought owners would tire of doing the marketing and bookings for their places and be happy to pay a commission to a local agency to represent them.

 

[Pauline]

What is the name of Paolo's owners' forum, Felicity? I used to read it regularly when I was taking care of the classifieds on slowtrav.com, and now I can't think of the name.

I remember! http://www.laymyhat.com/

 

[Chris]

That's it! That was really bugging me.

 

[Lisa in Ottawa]

I had a look at layourhat.com. Wow! that was an eye opener. It's a tough old world out there.

 

[Felicity]

Well Homeaway has now added the new service fee to Homeaway.com, vacationrental.com ( didn't even know they owned this and had never heard of it) and VRBO.com.

The fury of owners has to be seen to be believed on the Homeaway community forum - one thread having over 1000 posts. They are losing bookings because of it as guests quite rightly don't want to be hit with a booking fee which seems to have little added value.

One site which has been mentioned several times and which operates in the 'old fashioned' way of being mere a listing site - direct contact with owner, no fees ( the owner pays them a subscription) is vacationhomerentals.com. Confusing, very similar names these listing sites have!

I had never heard of this one either but it is under the TripAdvisor umbrella. Has anybody else heard of it or ever booked a property through it?

 

[Chris]

I vaguely remember seeing this site, but I've never used it. Today, the first listing I looked at was this one: https://www.vacationhomerentals.com/Lourmarin/proID-223602/

A studio for one person for $16800 a week hardly inspires confidence. It may be that I just happened on one bad listing among many wonderful ones, but it didn't encourage me to look further.

 

[Felicity]

Oh dear