Holiday home and villa rental sites offer little to today’s traveler
Holiday home and villa rental sites are little more than simple listing services that disappoint and often frustrate the consumer and give an industry a bad name. There is much room for improvement.
In the age of the sharing economy where internet marketers will have us believe everything is easier to book online rather than the old way (in this case with a travel agent or tour operator) holiday home and villa rental sites are ubiquitous. Unfortunately, they offer nothing but poor low-tech lists, all with the same product.
All sites list the same properties
Sites such as ownersdirect, homeaway and holidayletting all list the same holiday homes, apartments and villas. It hardly matters what site you use, they are all virtually the same, listing exactly the same stock. The homeaway group lists 12 sister sites on the footer of its main website. Holidaylettings is part of TripAdvisor, which owns multiple sites.
Another thing they have in common is a poor customer service offering. Each site makes the consumer do the legwork, rather than the property owners and managers, or the website staff. If you are lucky you will need to make five enquires to get an available property. If you are unlucky you could make 30+ enquiries and find that all are unavailable even though your search specified exact dates and search results indicated availability. There is an opportunity in the market for a meta-search site in this space.
Poor customer service
When you call into or phone a good travel agency or tour operator, a team of experienced agents is ready to help you with your enquiry. Behind the scenes there are product managers who make sure the product listed in their systems and on their websites is current, up-to-date and available.
Holiday home and villa rental sites seem to think that this type of product management is no longer necessary, that the internet can do it all. They seem to think that the home owner, with no training or industry experience, will update their property profile with new images and changes in availability. They seem to think that the consumer is happy to wasting hours searching and searching again and then waiting hours and days for property owners to reply, which often they don’t.
There is no substitute for good inventory and product management. The holiday home rental market is a complicated product that needs experienced industry heads as well as good technology. One doesn’t work without the other. The only example of a well-managed holiday home website and inventory with a real customer service infrastructure that this writer has experienced is the Swiss company Interhome. Interhome have support offices in major holiday resorts where they have multiple properties and they vet every property before it is listed.
No one at home
It is not uncommon for property owners and managers to ignore or simply not reply to enquiries. If they already have a booking for their property then why would they bother replying to another enquiry? This is of course not surprising, as a lot of properties are managed by their owners, who are by their very nature not professional property managers. Therefore, the unsuspecting holiday home hunter needs to be making multiple enquiries, not enquiring or trying to book just one specific property, the one that appealed to them on their initial search. But how is a holiday home hunter to know this? A good hotel or tour operator website would not expect this of its customers. There is clearly a reason hotels employ customer service teams, managers, service and wait staff and concierges.
The end result is unhappy and frustrated customers that will never return to these sites or this holiday type. An industry segment is being unnecessarily damaged.
Why no real-time booking?
The most frustrating issue is that with so much technology available to the travel industry, none of the above sites have managed or bothered to invest in a real time booking engine. Most sites pretend to offer real-time booking via a ‘booking engine’ form, but in reality they are nothing more than enquiry forms executed via old school email technology.
All the current industry research shows that holiday booking lead times are getting shorter and shorter. In the case of intra-European travel, it is down to two days at its lowest level. This is of course thanks to the boom in low cost airlines and airfares and the diversification away from hub airports.
There is a disconnect between low cost flights being booked with a lead time of two days and a holiday home booking request that remains unanswered two days later. The hotel industry may be under attack from the sharing economy but it still has many strengths.
Inventory not updated
The biggest issue is that the sites rely on the property owners or managers to update their own availabilities or inventory. The reality is that they don’t and the rental sites don’t manage them either. There are no incentives to encourage them to do it. Why should they? They are no more than simple Web 1.0 listing sites.
Now that Web 2.0 is well established these sites have the potential to be so much more. Real-time bookings are possible, if some time and effort were invested by both owner managers and the websites themselves. The responsibility lies primarily with the listing websites. The problem is that they don’t bother. There exists a conflict of interest.
Conflict of interest
The property owners and managers pay to list their properties on these sites. So why would sites penalise these same property owners who list their properties as being available when they are already sold. No one knowingly bites the hand that feeds them.
Some sites have tried to cover themselves against such complaints by showing when the property owner last updated their listing (see email below). In the screenshot below taken from August 2015 the property owner last updated their listing in January 2015. What use is that?
False advertising
A bigger issue is listing sites being used by commercial letting agencies. In test searches I carried out when researching this article I enquired about two properties that were listed as available for specific dates in August. In both instances I received emails from agencies advising that the property in question was not available but suggesting that they had other properties available.
At first glance one might think the agencies were being helpful in offering alternatives. But in reality the property I wanted and had enquired about was being used as bait by the agency, in order to propose properties idling on their books.
If the agencies knew the property wasn’t available then they shouldn’t have listed it.
Single property owners renting out their summer homes for a few weeks of the year is one thing, but there are no excuses for professional rental agencies with out of date listings. These agencies are wasting consumers’ time. Imagine this happening in the hotel industry?
In this article I do not touch upon the topic of fake property adverts/scams and consumers booking and paying for properties that have not been verified, or worse where legitimate owners’ email addresses have been hacked. That is a whole other story, and one which has been written about at length elsewhere.
A solution
The holiday home rental market is in reality no different to that of a tour operator or airline. Serious investment and regulation is needed. If a booking is made by someone in Ireland in sterling to a UK based property owner for a French property via a website registered in the Netherlands, who takes responsibility and who regulates? It’s a minefield. When things go wrong they go very wrong. National and European regulators need to step in.
The only solution this writer can see is for the sector to be brought into the 21st century with serious investment, either by an established player or by a highly capitalised start-up. Experienced travel and service industry staff numbers are needed as well as an upgrade in technology.
There is a real opportunity here. If someone steps in and provides a genuinely good product the first generation pretenders will disappear.
Have you used holiday home and villa rental sites? What was your experience? Tweet us @TravelMedia_ie and let us know!
Disclaimer: Declaration of interest. Interhome are a client of TravelMedia.ie.