What are Vacation Rental Aggregators and Meta-Search Engines?
Meta-search has been a big player in both the flight and hotel industry spaces for several years. Google Hotel Ads, HotelsCombined, Kayak, TripAdvisor and Trivago displays the real-time rates of hotels across numerous sources (e.g. OTAs and hotel's own website) to ultimately identify the cheapest booking option for the traveller.
The phenomenal growth of vacation rental listing sites and OTAs over the last 10 years has inevitably resulted in a considerably decentralised booking process.
This industry fragmentation is an issue which is some companies are seeking to address.
A small selection of new vacation rental meta-search engines are now aggregating data from scores of leading listing sites and OTAs (most notably from the big players including Airbnb, Booking, the HomeAway network and TripAdvisor Rentals) with the aim of conveniently displaying comparative rates across one booking site.
Unlike the more straight-forward hotel industry there are still many difficulties facing meta-search in vacation rentals. Much of this is down to the different nature of this growing sector.
Duplicate listings are still commonplace (i.e. a property published on TripAdvisor up against the exact same property on a HomeAway network site). Pricing aggregated from brands owned by the same parent (e.g. VRBO, HomeAway.co.uk) will often be identical.
The most prominent vacation rental meta-search engines / aggregators are:
- Alltherooms
- Apartum
- Holidu
- Hometogo
- Hundredrooms
- Likibu
- Vacationrenter
Founded: 2014
Headquarters: Berlin
Number of Listings: 11.6 million
Berlin-based Hometogo is a meta search engine which compares over 11.5 million vacation rental properties and services more than 20 million users a month.
The three founders brought their experience in flight meta-search, vacation rental OTA and e-commerce together to form Hometogo in 2014.
Compare prices for rentals from more than 250 providers in over 200 countries. Once you've found your dream rental, simply click on the link to be redirected to our partner's website and complete the booking.
Although mostly serving European and the US, Hometogo also operates single sites operates in 17 international markets; Australia, Austria, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands, United Kingdom and the United States.
Aggregation partners include Booking.com, Everystay, VRBO, TUI, Homeaway network, E-domizil and TripAdvisor.
To add your property to Hometogo visit preferred partners: Booking, HomeAway or TripAdvisor