HomeAway is starting to make good on its pledge to speed the online booking of vacation rentals.
The vacation rental giant partnered  with Yapstone and will use its VacationRentPayment solution to enable properties listed on HomeAway.com and VRBO to accept payments via credit cards, debit cards and electronic checks. Yapstone says the solution also includes integrated payment reporting.
Last summer HomeAway hired Brent Bellm, who worked at PayPal for the previous nine years, and there was speculation that the decision was colored in part by the need to enhance electronic payments.
And Brian Sharples, HomeAway cofounder and CEO, has gone on record saying that he wants to facilitate online booking of vacation rentals for a majority of the company’s vacation-rental owners within three years.
The YapStone deal could be a step toward that goal.
Yapstone says its VacationRentPayment product will be “fully integrated into an online reservation mangement dashboard.”
“By partnering with YapStone, we will advance our strategy to create the best traveler experience, offering a seamless process for our travelers and our owners to pay and collect payments online,” says Sharples. “This is a major step to make booking vacation homes as easy as booking a hotel online.”
This can only be good news for the industry. One of the big problems facing property owners and managers of holiday lets is processing payments. However, I do think that if banks were more open to working with people in the “high risk” industry of self catering/holiday rentals then more companies would be working to offer this service.
This is probably bad news for most vacation-rental owners. HomeAway and VRBO never miss a trick when it comes to jacking up their rates or inventing some questionable new “service” that we owners have to pay extra for. My bet on this credit-card service is that HA and VRBO will REQUIRE owners to use it (instead of, say, PayPal) and will gouge a substantial percentage off the top.
What I find most disappointing is that in the ‘journalistic’ community there is very little reporting on the goons of HomeAway and just the parroting of Brian Sharples’ press releases. As a vacation rental home owner/renter for more than a decade I agree with poster Fulano. Further I am not anxious to have an online booking engine for my vacation home rentals. I prefer to vette my potential renters to prevent the likes of Chevy Chase and the Griswold’s or the sadistically sick baby smashers from the Ministry of De-Tourism on my property. Sharples and co. are totally out of touch with the owner community. They act more like an organized gang muscling in and selling ‘insurance’ to the property owners, “why not advertise on our other sites [at extra expense]? I counter, “Why not consolidate those other sites into one mega-vacation rental site? Sharples and co. prefer the extortion technique. They [HomeAway] are no more than a glorified classified advert service but with all the sizzle up front they have blinded the investment community to the fact that they are no more than a bucket of BS without a product.
It’s probably not in my best interest to defend my competitors, but this does seem a little unfair. HomeAway will keep putting their prices up in-line with the return that owners get from them. If owners are paying more than they get back they will leave. I’m sure HomeAway realise that.
The online booking debate is one that’s raised each time an article about HomeAway is produced. There are plenty of people who don’t like it. But I have to say there are also plenty of people that do, especially from the guests side. Online booking doesn’t negate the ability to vet bookings, it can support the vetting process.
As for consolidating all the sites into one, this would be a bad idea. The main reason they spent the money buying these brands was to gain from their age, in-bound links, etc. (to maintain good listings in search results).
Mr. Thomas: HomeAway has raised the prices on the various vacation-rental sites it owns far beyond being “in-line with the return that owners get from them.” It used to be practical for owners to “leave,” as you suggest, because there existed real competition, e.g., between VRBO and VacationRentals. Now HomeAway owns both and has jacked up the prices on both. As HomeAway has monopolized the industry, the vacation-rental owner has nowhere else to turn.
Just watch: When HomeAway implements its credit-card “service,” it will, as I said, gouge the owners for it, and the owners will have no reasonable alternative but to pay up and shut up.
Read their S1 filing for their public offering. People are leaving. Their renewal rate is only 74%. That means 125,000 of the 500,000 listings leave each year. Replacing those advertisers will be unsustainable. Their whole business model is to squeeze more out of every listing… hence higher prices for those who stay.
http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1366684/000119312511064128/0001193125-11-064128-index.htm
Interesting read. $125MM paid for VRBO.
Not true that there isn’t an alternative to homeaway. Owners have only got themselves to blame. Its a supply and demand issue. If you all flock to the same rental site then sure as eggs are eggs the others will fold and you’ll have no alternative and they WILL put prices up.
My site is in the final stages of a booking system that allows owners maximum flexibility. Take or leave credit card transactions, talk or don’t talk to renters, go live or take referrals from us.
We’re also building a network to expand through other sites and we DO NOT charge extras for those sites. One fee for all services.
Homeaway are not the only kid on the block, but if you all flock to them they soon will be
No one said “that there isn’t an alternative to homeaway.” What I wrote was that there exists no REASONABLE alternative. That’s because HomeAway has all but monopolized the vacation-rental market. You appear not to understand the concept of monopoly. Instead, you blame the victims. We don’t “flock” to HomeAway. Rather, we go there reluctantly, having no practical, reasonable option.
Best of luck, Andy, with your own site. I hope it offers us owners a realistic alternative to HomeAway. But I’ll believe it when I see it.
Fulano,
Homeaway are actually in an oligopoly not a monopoly. The reason owners are creating this is because like any market the less suppiers YOU have the less competition thye have. This means they will charge what they want.
I know they are going around buying everybody up but there are still alternatives to them. You need to find and support them or you will be faced with a monopoly for sure.
After only 3 months of listing I am already getting 1/3 of my bookings through Flipkey. I probably won’t renew VRBO next year. The high price is a factor, but the Homeaway\VRBO review policy is much more of an issue. In the past month I have been subject to 2 renters extorting money from me against the threat of a negative review.
T,
Take a look at Guestscan.
This is our solution to helping owners ‘vet’ customers before they accept bookings. They are independent to us and we are currently integrating them into what we do. Renters who do this sort of thing should be given to Guestscan so when they try to rent again in the future owners can check them against a database of other undesirable guests. http://guestscan.co.uk