Interesting things going on in the holiday rental industry. After securing a much discussed $250 million funding HomeAway has at last redesigned its set of aesthetically awful websites. Now they indeed look far better and more professional. As a result of its aggressive acquisition strategy, HomeAway has taken up just about every major player in the market. Here are the HomeAway websites: Holiday-Rentals.co.uk, OwnersDirect.co.uk, VacationRentals.com, Abritel.fr, VRBO.com, FeWo-direkt.de, TripHomes.com, A1Vacations.com, GreatRentals.com, CyberRentals.com. So what else are they going to do with the funds apart from redesigning their websites and acquiring competitors? Snap up all the smaller rental listing sites and establish the total monopoly? Or maybe purchase HolidayRentals.com domain from Tim Hall, whom Holiday-Rentals.com Limited has previously brought to the court trying to take away this totally generic domain?

We’ll see.

By the way, why does HomeAway want HolidayRentals.com so much? Because of the traffic leakage: an A-B.com domain will always lose substantial amount of traffic to AB.com. People tend to remember the terms (”A” and “B”) and dot com is burned into their minds, but they never remember any hyphens in between. So HomeAway’s Holiday-Rentals.com loses a lot of traffic (read “revenue”) to HolidayRentals.com. That’s why it is best to avoid hyphenated domains. If it isn’t possible then it’s relieving to know that hyphenated domains can still do a good SEO job: from the search engine’s point of view phrase “AB” isn’t different from “A-B” - same keywords in the domain.

Let’s go back to the holiday rental industry.

It is young and thriving, rough and actively developing - thus offering space for innovative ideas. One such idea is to tackle the fragmentation of the holiday rental market. Aggregation of rental information, an aggregator website that is. Similar to TravelSupermarket.com but for holiday rentals. While there is a lot of aggregation attempts in the package holiday sector, in the holiday rental world it’s quite a new idea.

Otalo is a new rental aggregator, claiming to be “The Vacation Home Search Engine”. A simple test reveals it doesn’t come close to a real search engine: searching for my all time favourite - “italy pool villa” - yields: “Drats! We couldn’t find any vacation homes with your criteria…“. It reminded me of another, older website - PerfectGetaways.co.uk - that also claimed to be “The Holiday Home Search Engine” but failed on the same search with: “Sorry, there were no results found for your search“. Ah, marketing tricks! A search engine without a search functionality Sales people seem to have no idea of what a search engine is. PerfectGetaways.co.uk isn’t even an aggregator, just a regular listing site and despite that its creators didn’t bother building full-text search against their own database.

Are there any aggregators that work? There are some, such as WeGoRound.com (which is also a true holiday rental search engine), but unfortunately the biggest problem for aggregators and rental search engines is aggregation of availability calendars and presentation of accurate information in general. With so many calendar formats in use it’s technically challenging to write a software that “understands” all of them. And by and large, it’s virtually impossible to scrape the content automatically in a reliably accurate way. No machine understands content better than a human yet. So far no one has reliably solved the problem of full and accurate aggregation of holiday rental information. And I bet it won’t be sorted till there is a single common database of holiday rentals exposing a formalized API for querying. Similar to existing systems serving the package holiday sector. By the way this should also allow for real-time bookings - another wanted feature. To sum up: clearly the holiday rental industry is entering the aggregation and search engine era - I am sure we will face more innovative ideas soon.

The number of listing websites is on the increase. Indeed they spring up like mushrooms after the rain. Adding nothing new, they simply clone each other’s functionality (and the mistakes!). 99% of the rental listing websites are aesthetically awful and practically useless, but the amount of them is still impressive. Interestingly, despite the legion of listing sites, the principal owner’s question is still there: Where should I advertise? What are the best holiday home advertising sites? This nice site I found recently may help you in answering the question. It is a directory of listing websites along with reviews and ratings. Just note that the site is still starting off and hasn’t got a lot on it now. Also don’t forget that something that works for one property/area doesn’t work for another and vice versa. So you need to try a few listing sites before you find the best one for you. Don’t forget to vote and add your impressions about the listing sites you tried yourself.

I hope you enjoyed my subjective insight. Good luck and have fun advertising!