If, like us, you spend time on holiday/vacation rental forums and discussion groups you’ll have noticed that many owners out there are not happy. Not happy at all. And why? Well, HomeAway (the big fish) have recently made a number of proposals and changes to HomeAway and VRBO advert mainenance and communication with guests.
Here’s the lowdown for anyone not aware…
Room Number Search Filter – customers are now being asked to specify the exact number of rooms required unless they specify a minimum and maximum and the bottom of the search box. VRBO no longer has a number of bedrooms + option, meaning that unless guests realise (will everyone?), then only that exact number of bedrooms will show up in the results. Owners of properties with more rooms will probably be affected.
‘Hotel Style’ Nightly Rates Structure – introduced a couple of weeks ago on both sites. Opposition lies primarily in owners not wanting to use a nightly rate but further confusion resulted over weekday/weekend nights and split-seasonal/bank holiday rate changes. It has lead to many owners’ rates showing up incorrectly, various bugs, a ‘taxes not included’ default message up at the bottom by default and a ‘per night night‘ text showing up (is a ‘sleeping on the job’ gag too easy here?). Other arguments arose from weekly rates only accounting for the sum of 7 days, giving owners no scope to discount for a full week, and cheap nightly rates being very deceptive as guests had to abide by a minimum stay to get said rate – resulting in many owners getting increased enquiries for a rate that is not available. Add monthly fees, pet fees, extra person fees…there was a lot of disillusionment. HomeAway has listened and since changed the matrix to allow guests to revert to the original rate system.
Mandatory Log-in when replying to enquiries. This is on-going and in response to the rise of phishing – which we all agree is a serious problem. However many owners have pointed out that as this currently has only affected around 0.1% of all adverts on the sites, the vast majority of switched-on and sensible owners will be punished as a result – they will not see the guest’s email address (a la Airbnb), won’t be able to hit reply from their personal email account and must login to respond. 41 pages of opposition to this on HomeAway community boards…and counting.
Not our opinion folks. This is what hundreds of owners are saying.
Agree? Disagree? Please let us know…we’ll happily post your thoughts here…