I love studying what is going on in the vacation rental space because it is so closely related to my niche of home rentals. I have been looking over FlipKey.com and thought I would put my thoughts in a blog post.

My first impression is that is has almost a Oodle.com feel to it, perhaps it is the color scheme or the filtering processes on the right sidebar – I am not sure.

But I always admire sites like this one that have the guts to post reviews about properties like apartmentratings.com does. Anytime you put up reviews you are going to tick someone off. Clearly the site is built for the person looking for a place to stay – which I think is a great approach. But you need thick skin from all the vacation property owners about all the comment you will get.

I know that HomeAway.com that owns VRBO has a rating system on their site, but the rating is based off the accuracy of the info the owner provided and not the person’s experience at the vacation rental. I know if I am looking for a vacation rental I would love to hear what others thought of it before I rented it out.

I spoke with TJ Mahony from FlipKey and he gave me some insight on the name of the site which I like:

We want to help people feel more comfortable renting someone else’s home and the word “Key” is synonymous with security… Because the vacation rental experience is substantially more personal than staying in a cookie cutter hotel, we want people to feel confident about sharing / staying in each other’s homes. As a result, we choose “FlipKey” as our name to conjure images of someone ‘flipping’ their house keys, stories and personal experiences with a rental home to someone else…. It’s all about community and trust.

Our family got to go on a really nice vacation last month and we got to stay in very posh condo on the ocean.

Since I need to get work done while on vacation we needed a condo with high speed internet access.

The condo we ended up getting had the choice of WiFi or a hard wired Cat5 connection.

Having Cat5 makes it nice because of security concerns. Most all vacation rental WiFi is open to anyone because the owner is probably not going to hand out WiFi passwords. So having the Cat5 wiring in each room was an added bonus.

From the picture below I thought they did a nice install job.

Since I have ranked for the phrase “VRBO” for awhile in the top 10 on Google I can see when people are searching for vacation rentals.

It appears most people start their search for vacation rentals in late October to mid November. To me this makes sense because that is the time my wife used HomeAway.com for our next vacation.

Google Analytics is really cool for finding out these neat trends.

Once again I was playing around with Google Trends tonight and found something of interest. (little bored and didn’t want to do any real work tonight)

I thought it might be interesting to take two industry leaders which are very related to each other side by side. Of course I picked RentClicks first since they appear to be the leader in my industry (I would like to change that in 2007 ). Then to change it up a bit, I picked VRBO.com which is the leader (from what I can tell) in the vacation rental market.

Before I got the results back from Google, I guessed that both would track pretty evenly, and I thought I would see some interesting seasonal shifts. Wow, was I wrong. VRBO blew the doors off my industry. I do own a vacation rental site that I have not put much time into – perhaps I should rethink that.

You will notice that I used just the name of the URL without the “.com”. I did this because studies show many people use search engines to go to sites. Many people will type in “VRBO” or “RentClicks” right in to Google instead of the address bar to navigate to a site even when they know the full URL. So this chart represents people that already aware of the brand and are not searching for it the first time.

I am somewhat blown away by the power of the vacation rental market compared to the market that I serve. You would think that there are far less vacation rentals out there, therefore less people search for them.

If this happens to be my last post before Christmas, Merry Christmas to all my readers.

[tags]VRBO, Rentclicks, Google Trends[/tags]

I just read on the AP wire that HomeAway Inc just purchased vrbo.com for an undisclosed amount. Now HomeAway owns most all of the top 10 search results for the phrase “vacation rentals”.

Interesting how the vacation rental sites are going the same way as my industry. This year Primedia purchased top ranked RentClicks and Homerentalads which are two of my competitors.

On a side note: Rocky Mountain National park vacation rentals is the page my wife uses when we are looking to head up to Estes Park.