Top 10 Vacation Rental Companies
We’ve compiled a list of the top ten most popular vacation rental websites based on Alexa traffic, reader response, and industry expert analysis. While the vacation rental industry varies greatly between simple listing sites and more robust vacation rental booking services, this list is intended to provide a quick look at this rapidly growing industry and provide readers with a foundation for future research on this industry. Please note that this list is in no particular order and is only intended as a guide.
1) Vacation Rentals by Owner
Perhaps one of the industry’s most well-known creators of online vacation rental listings, Vacation Rentals By Owner has a huge database of rental listings from private owners. Now owned by the giant mega-company, HomeAway.com, this is one of their many branded property rental websites. While it is the best known and extremely popular, the website is not without its faults. Constant criticism of listing security and ownership legitimacy are the main complaints against this industry leader.
2) Vacation Rentals
Another of HomeAway’s popular offspring, VacationRentals.com, typically ranks first on most major search engines for the Holy Grail of keyword terms, “vacation rentals.” Basically on the same premise as Vacation Rentals By Owner, this website is a strong advertising site for individual owners and property managers.
3) Cyberrentals
Why stop now? Yes, you’re right, yet another HomeAway spin-off. Again, on the same premise as CyberRentals and Vacation Rentals By Owner, CyberRentals offers another avenue for rental owners to list their properties and manage inventory. A clean website that follows the same patterns and guidelines as its predecessors.
4) Home away
We couldn’t mention some of the most popular vacation rental websites without mentioning the parent company that owns them, right? According to their information included in Crunch Base, “HomeAway’s portfolio of sites includes HomeAway.com, Vacation Rentals By Owner and VacationRentals.com in the US; HomeAway.co.uk and OwnersDirect.co.uk in the UK; HomeAway .de in Germany Abritel.fr and Homelidays.com in France HomeAway.es in Spain and AlugueTemporada.com.br in Brazil The company’s portfolio also includes HomeAwayRealEstate.com, which offers unique real estate information highlighting property of a vacation home rental income potential and destination specifics In addition, HomeAway operates BedandBreakfast.com, a global site dedicated to finding bed and breakfast properties, providing travelers with another source of unique accommodation alternatives to chain hotels. Regardless of what is being said about the future of the vacation industry, it’s a safe bet that HomeAway will be at the center of it all.
5) Always on vacation
AlwaysOnVacation is a listing service that offers pay-per-click rentals. They offer owners an advertising guarantee that states “if you don’t receive a 10x return on your investment during the first 12 months of your initial subscription, we’ll extend your subscription an additional 6 months at no charge.” Although it is another listing site among thousands of listing sites, AlwaysOnVacation has quite a large database of property listings.
6) Zoning
Zonder is an interesting spin on the vacation rental industry. Currently a longtime partner of Orbitz, the longtime hotel and flight booking website, Zonder appears to be a solid choice for vacation renters. Visitors can book online and communicate with owners who do not offer online reservations. It will be interesting to see how long the two-tier business approach will work, as many argue that it will only cause confusion as the industry gains popularity, but for now Zonder’s future looks solid.
7) Vacation-Renter, Inc.
We call this the little engine that could. Grossly outgunned on almost every level, Vacation-Renter, Inc. has taken a guerrilla-style approach when attempting to attack the vacation rental market. They do this by offering market-specific websites aimed at achieving high rankings in Google and international markets. While they don’t have the inventory or operating capital like the others, they do offer online booking and live phone booking support with their market specific websites and seem to have been growing steadily for the last 5 years. They also offer the only industry index available to vacation rental industry insiders. Here he is supporting the little one!
8) Rental
Rentalo.com is a popular listing site based on the pay per ad listing system. Like the HomeAway family of websites, Rentalo is a simple advertising website. They have a good reputation and currently offer listings all over the world.
9) Spin key
One of the newer vacation rental websites to hit the web, FlipKey offers a great user interface and the power of being part of the Trip Advisor marketing machine. Probably one of the cleanest and most visually appealing advertising sites, FlipKey has gone live and seems to be gaining major influence in the industry.
10) Vacation Rental411
One of the few larger websites not currently owned by HomeAway, VacationRentals411 is another advertising site that offers vacation rentals around the world. Not as visually appealing as some of the other sites mentioned, it still offers decent online owner support and extensive inventory. This website is a good place to look for quality vacation listings.
While this list cannot do justice to the entire vacation rental industry, it does provide an interesting combination of size and type of business currently active in today’s market. While it seems that certain companies clearly have an advantage when it comes to investment and size, there are some quality sites that offer a different approach to marketing short-term rentals. Wherever you decide to travel, try doing some initial research on some of these websites and see for yourself.