10 Best Vacation Rental Booking services
1. AirbnbAirbnb online marketplace and hospitality service, enabling people to lease or rent short-term lodging including vacation rentals, apartment rentals, homestays, hostel beds, or hotel rooms. The company does not own any lodging; it is merely a broker and receives percentage service fees from both guests and hosts in conjunction with every booking. It has over 3,000,000 lodging listings in 65,000 cities and 191 countries, and the cost of lodging is set by the host.
2. Booking.com
Booking.com is a travel fare aggregator website and travel meta-search engine for lodging reservations of Dutch origin. The website lists approximately 1,400,000+ properties in 226 countries and books 1,200,000 room nights per day. The site is available in 43 languages. Booking.com is ahead of the curve with its traveler friendly user interface and instantly bookable inventory.
3. HomeAway
HomeAway Inc. is a vacation rental marketplace with more than 2,000,000 vacation rentals in 190 countries. It has operated through 50 websites in 23 languages. The company offers a comprehensive selection of rentals for families and groups to find accommodations such as cabins, condos, castles, villas, barns and farm houses. Unlike Airbnb, travelers will likely not be interacting with the owners/hosts of the property.
4. Homestay
Homestay is a popular form of hospitality and lodging whereby visitors stay in a house or apartment of a local of the city to which they are traveling. The length of stay can vary from one night to even a year and can be free, in exchange for monetary compensation, in exchange for a stay at the guest's property. Longer term homestays are popular with students that are participating in study abroad programs.
5. Hotels.com
Hotels.com is for booking hotel rooms online and by telephone. The company has 85 websites in 34 languages, and lists over 325,000 hotels in approximately 19,000 locations. Its inventory includes hotels and B&Bs, and some condos and other types of commercial lodging. n major markets, up to 30% of their inventory is serviced apartments and apartment hotels. its entire inventory is instantly bookable and they are one of the few sites to offer true discounting.
6. Trivago
Trivago's hotel search engine was the first of its kind in Germany and has websites in 50+ countries. It claims to be the world's largest online hotel search site, comparing rates from over 1 million hotels and more than 250 booking sites worldwide. The site includes over 190 million hotel ratings and 14 million photos, and reports over 120 million visitors per month. Trivago's search tool scans hotel booking sites for prices, availability, images and reviews within seconds.
7. Expedia
Expedia can be used to book airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rentals, cruises, vacation packages and various attractions and services via the internet or telephone agents. The site uses multiple global distribution systems like Amadeus or the Sabre reservation systems for flights and for hotels, Worldspan and Pegasus, along with its own hotel reservation system for contracted, bulk-rate reservations.
8. Roomorama
Roomorama has about 80,000 properties worldwide but caters particularly well to APAC area. An user can book what they see on the site right away. Roomorama is a contender though as shared, the inventory is significantly less and is really bested suited for traveling in Asia. An additional bonus is that they have 24/7 customer service and claim to have fully verified hosts.
9. Flipkey
Flipkey offers 300,000 vacation homes and rooms in 11,000 cities throughout the world. Acquired by Tripadvisor in 2008, Flipkey has all the advantages of Tripadvisor reviews largest in the vacation rental industry with one of the largest inventories of vacation homes. Every host/owner is verified to ensure that the property is real and safe for users. Flipkey offers are a variety of methods for booking including inquiries, booking requests and instant bookings.
10. Tripping.com
Tripping.com is an online search engine and aggregator for vacation rentals. It aggregates over 10 million listings in more than 150,000 cities worldwide. Users can search by price, ratings, location and a long list of features and amenities.
