Vacation rentals are big business. HomeAway, which owns a dozen or so vacation home listing sites, just raised $250 million in a venture round that values the company at more than $1 billion.
But listings are spread across lots of sites – what the industry needed was a good central search engine for all those vacation home rentals. It’s also a pain to do lots of searches on different sites because you have to enter where and when you want to go, making it a lot more complicated that a standard search engine query.
That’s just what Otalo, which just launched, is doing. They are starting off with 200,000 listings. The company was founded by Michael Giles (the founder of Furl) and Baer Tierkel. The name Otalo comes from the Zen symbol enzo – “O” – with the Finnish word for house – “talo.”
The company will earn commissions from the referral of customers to the various vacation rental sites. By the way, if you always stay in hotels on trips, you should try renting a house sometimes. It’s much calmer and usually a lot cheaper. You can also get great deals at the last minute.
In a former life I was webmaster for a travel company that did a lot of work with timeshare/vacation rentals.
There are about 10 ways these companies can leverage rev. from these properties so its great to see some serious online plays.
And yes, there are some great deals here. Lots of unused inventory to pull from.
I also had a friend you used to work for a travel-related company and they didn’t pay him enough wage.
Meh, just another aggreagator who scrapes sub par information, and mashes up stuff yielding results that are inaccurate and frustrating to interact with.
Do a search and filter by $500 max weekly, you’ll see most results are still there.
Note to devs… real estate and search sites with incomplete and/or inaccurate information need to rethink their model. Come on Mike call a spade a spade.
completely agree with you, nice looking cool website but there are a few around already, but i wish them every success
Just finished developing this site for our client and IMO it kicks ass: aholidayhouse.com
Can you develop a site for me? Looks like a cool site.
Search aholidayhouse.com in google, about seven down. That’s the company that developed the site.
The problem with these types of websites is that consumers are dealing with a company that works with a middle man who then works with a local manager who then works with the owner…..not good.
Consumers have a few options when renting a villa.
1. Deal with HomesAway which generally works with owners direct. You risk limited service, quality control questionable.
2. Lay down a few hundred $$$$ and join a membership club like Exclusive Resorts. Cool concept but you’re limited to their inventory.
3. Book a la carte with a company like ours, Luxury Retreats. Better quality control but you’re not dealing with an owner direct….better protection?
Either way, try booking a villa, you get better value….it’s a fun way to travel.
Jazz
Luxury Retreats
Mike techcrunch very often crashes on the iPhone now…
Wow, this is the crappiest website ever. Anyone can build it with 10k, why do they need 250 mil… Are they going to pay every person who lists on their site $100–then they could have 2.5 million listings.
The $250m refers to Homeaway.com rather than the one directly mentioned in the article.
mainstream america will never accept a company named otalo. who is responsible for this?
This ideas can become some profits in china although it’s not the first website that kind. The most important to improve it is quality, service quality, bargin quality, house quality, and etc…
Over here at Valnur (Very Accessible and Logically Navigable Universal Repository), we do not believe that the future of search is in having separate websites to specialize in *certain* verticals and/or local niches as we have found a solution to roll them into one.
Good profitable Idea although it’s not the first website,it’s going to be a fun way to travel.
I also had a friend who used to work for a travel-related company and she lacked with enough wage.
i like it a lot – for years i’ve used vacationrentals to narrow listings in maine that will have enough bedrooms for myself, friends AND allow for my pack of dogs to come…
this site basically scrapes it but moves photos around (makes it easier to scan) and then provides the direct link back to calendars if available..
it’s like putting a better search interface on top of craigslist, or analogous to indeed or simplyhired for jobs…so what’s the big deal? i find the search is highly effective and they understand what people want in terms of interface and navigation (for the most part)
to the creators: you SHOULD consider moving availability into a core search filter – OR state clearly on the top level of a listing that no ‘availability information’ is available instead of making me click through multiple tabs to get there! just a though…
Thanks Dave. Moving availability data to being more ‘available’ is a good idea!
This is exactly what the Travel Industry needed for Vacation Home Rentals. This is a very useful tool that I have played with and used, it is very very cool and takes the pain out of finding an appropriate vacation home for your Family.
Brilliant Idea for a website. Wish I’d thought of it.
I bet that is what these guys are thinking: http://www.vamoose.com
I’m the CEO of FlipKey.com and we are very active in the VR space. Otalo is one of several services that are aggregating the basic listing information across multiple vacation rental sites. For instance, Vast.com has been doing this for nearly two years and powers the vacation rental search on Away.com and CheapTickets. I believe RentExpert has also begun to go down this path.
The site looks great and I wish them well. The major challenge will be attracting a robust volume of visitor volume. To date, minus HomeAway and a handful of others, few VR sites have been able to achieve critical visitor volume.
We find that to be true, it’s a super fragmented market, even in the tenant rental space.
Good note TJ
Thanks TJ. We love the work the FlipKey.com team has done with the VRMA and helping to further the vacation rental market! I think we share the goal of trying to make the process of finding a great vacation rental as easy and fun as possible for the renter.
Baer Tierkel
Otalo.com
Glad someone referenced Vast.com and there are at least another half-dozen screenscraping sites in the VR space. The market’s extremely fragmented so its an interesting challenge to try and solve. HomeAway is the 800 lb gorilla and has been trying to acquire its way to market domination – yet its still elusive.
I like Flipkey’s approach to focus on reviews and recommendations, but critical mass of reviews is a huge hurdle, so the investment by TripAdvisor seems to make alot of sense.
Jim Kovarik
http://www.costtodrive.com
I was also going to mention that Vast has been doing this for quite some time, TJ beat me to it.
http://www.free...th-vastcom.html
What drives this type of business is microformats, and there’s not a decent microformat for vacation rental homes yet, but soon there will be, and when that happens, google will own all VR searches.
Fantastic site, nice work!
I like the feature of recommending nearby rentals using the map.
Looks awesome. Great job. Love the simple UI. The data could use a little work though. For example, shows Folly beach (correct sp) and Folley Beach – also Isle of Palms (correct) and Isle of Palm.
Oh lord…Mike, did you even try using it?
Hint: search for “94114″ at their homepage, http://www.otalo.com/
You’ll end up in Florida, when the ZIP is from SF, CA.
Alternately, try searching for “SF, CA”. It doesn’t even recognize that!
LAME!
Hi Ajay
Zip codes are coming. We prioritized the features that vacation home renters’ actually use and found that zip code is very rarely used to search for a vacation home. But thanks for pointing it out, we’re working on it.
Baer
Otalo.com
I’m CEO of Escapia.com and ClearStay.com. We’re a leader in providing online marketing, distribution and business management services for vacation rental managers.
Since we distribute to third party sites, we’re always happy to see new sites like Otalo increase the profile for vacation rentals. Too few consumers recognize that they can have a far better experience for a lot less money by renting a home than staying in a hotel.
The big challenges for any new vacation rental site are 1) displaying 100% reliable information (there’s a lot of dirty data out there), 2) making the booking process as easy as possible and 3) getting enough consumers to use the site that it matters to suppliers. Escapia helps online sites interested in distributing vacation rentals (which, by the way, aren’t just vertical VR sites) achieve the first two things. As TJ said earlier, achieving the third — sufficient traffic — is a big challenge for any site. We wish Otalo the best of luck!
Thanks Bill. We love Escapia’s one-stop solution for vacation rental owners & managers!
Baer
Otalo.com
Yes Bill! Agreed, and with the economy tilting towards some uncertain times people are more interested in travelling closer to home and using cheaper options to go on Vacation. Good timing for Otalo in launching this.
I see a fundamental problem with the way they are going after this industry. They are working with other directories who have contracts in place with property managers. Most property managers don’t want anything to do with vacation rentals by owner sites because it goes against their business. It is a hot topic when you sit down with them- so you have a company like Zonder who says they only work with property managers but they are now listed on Otalo along side VRBO sites and I doubt they got the OK from the property managers who they represent. If you look at Otalo you can easily see they went after specific large directories to populate the site rather than taking the time to find the property manager sites and deal with them directly. If I am a property manager and Otalo starts to do well I am going to want my listing to be represented by me and not a directory I have to pay for.
One other thing to note so there is not a misunderstanding on how they make money- I thought the article did a poor job of explaing this.
“The company will earn commissions from the referral of customers to the various vacation rental sites.”
From Otalo website if you click on press
“Otalo is supported by online advertising. So feel free to click on those ads that are interesting to you!”
Thanks for the comments, Tucker.
We’re a search engine (like Google), not a pay-directory. Our search index is just at its beginning – we are continually adding more and more homes as we find them. We search for vacation rentals on the ‘net regardless of location, price, ownership structure, etc. All homes are placed fairly (randomly), meaning we do not rank homes based on any fees (unlike the competition). Revenue comes from online advertising.
We think vacation rental directories that focus on either property managers and/or independent owners add tremendous value to their customers in terms of booking services, marketing, management, etc. Otalo extends their marketing reach (much like a Google) by delivering highly qualified leads to them that are ready for booking.
We look at the problem from the perspective of someone looking to rent a vacation home. We eliminate the need to try and find all the directories (there are thousands of them) and then the cumbersome process of searching multiple directories with multiple UIs, re-entering their information multiple times, nowhere to centrally save favorites, etc. We want to make that process much easier and fun.
Our goal is to get more renters into more vacation homes!
Baer
Otalo.com
Baer,
I love the site- I think the map is by far the best I have seen. Very clean and I think the site serves a purpose but I don’t think you can call it a search engine and expect people to buy that. How many search engines randomly rank anything? I do think you are building something very cool and if I were a property manager I would want to be on it. If it is free I would want it to be my site and not pay the per click, per lead, per booking fee to a 3rd party with my duplicate content. For Otalo I think that would mean you would have thousands of different formats to scrape and manipulate to fit your site or engine. If that were the case and you could do it, I think you would be getting closer to being a google. From the looks of it you are only scraping the bigest sites out there with a format that is easy to work into your directory. Regardless I think it is pretty cool and I can’t wait to see where you guys go from here. It is very impressive- Best of luck
I rent vacation rentals alot.
VRBO is the Google of this market. Most quality (often inexpensive) properties are on VRBO as well as one or two others.
Aggregating data from 2-3 sites isn’t a business. And, the key ingredient they can’t aggregate is AVAILABILITY by Calendar.
It is a time consuming process (that Otalo won’t help, only add time to) – until Availability is part of the Search criteria — and, VRBO and others desperately need a mobile version as well.
Adding ability to send out Bids to available properties for last-minute bookings would be an added plus.
There’s bound to be a User Generated rating/picture/review site that eventually leaps over the formal paid site(s).
Thanks for the comments travel_alot!
Otalo does provide search by availability calendar. Take a look at the on the left side where it says “Refine” when you are presented your location search results. You can also see the availability calendar in the detail for each property – if it was listed on the source site.
When you find a property that you like on Otalo, you can click to make a reservation and bid for a last minute-booking. Good idea, that’s a great way to get a deal!
Otalo has over 200,000 rental listings, far more than you will find on any single directory, we search far more than 1-2 sites!
Thanks,
Baer
Otalo.com
Sorry, I tried it out. For one city, Portland, you have 5 Listings (Otelo), where on VRBO, dozens are listed. I can go to the 2-3 major sites and come up with nearly 100 listings.
I really have a hard time believing that Otelo’s spiders dig into the Calendar feature (usually a 3rd party app) on vacation rental portals. If it were that easy, those same portals would offer “Availability” within their own Search criteria.
Lots of companies have dabbled in this space — I still think that an aggregator Site that features heavy User/Renter/Vacationer input will be the winner (actual photos, experiences, recommendations, etc.).
FYI – HomeAway owns VRBO. It was one of the many companies it has acquired in the space.
wow awesome!
As the Web has become so much abundant and diverse with its information, and as we all go online for finding stuff, we clearly need such services as Otalo for VR and SimplyHired, Indeed for jobs for every category of consumer interests.
In particular, rental real estate online has been very fragmented– Anyone who has looked for an apartment to rent knows the frustration of having to look at many classified or landlord sites.
Similar to Otalo, but for residential rentals, we at Cazoodle are building a vertical search by crawling and indexing apartments from everywhere on the Web, to provide more comprehensive and precise search experience.
http://apartmen...s.cazoodle.com/
cheers,
kevin
Very clean implementation. A lot of folks here have commented that the challenge is finding something that’s available and the desire is to find something you can get a deal on.
We launching http://www.Next...ekVacations.com in a few weeks which is ONLY a marketplace for last minute rentals. We help homeowners move unbooked inventory and we provide consumers with great deals.
The big difference is our listings are few specific discounted weeks, days, etc.
This is a great start at some competition for HomeAway, because most of their websites suck. But the bigger issue here is the lack of availability accuracy by the property owners. I rent homes and condos when on vacation, and when searching HomeAway, VRBO, and the others, at least 50% of the properties that show availability for a specific date range are actually already booked. So, you go through the process of entering a request for 5 or 10 or 20 properties, only to have half or more respond with “sorry, booked.”
No, that’s not a technology issue. But, until someone solves that problem, owner listing services will continue to be a time-consuming, frustrating process.
It’s still worth it, but it’s a pain.
It really is a shame that not enough vacationers realize that renting a property instead of spending excess funds on a comfortable hotel room not only yields more freedom, peace, and quiet, but if done by the week can actually be more affordable than staying @ a lavish hotel. If you see some of the properties listed in Otalo, it literally blows your mind when you see the asking price for the rental. Of course you have to take into consideration getting traveler’s insurance, making sure that it’s not too far away from some of the sites and features of the area you’re visiting and car rental.
Hi Baer!
I’m the Co-founder and President of Viscape – or http://viscape.com. Think “Visual Escape” or “Visualize your Escape.”
It looks like you’re meeting the world of vacation rental community right here post-Tech Crunch blog post, so nice to meet you!
I’m a little unusual in that I come from a hard core real estate background and have made my living from investing and developing in real estate. And before that, I advised tech/telecom start ups with their growth strategies. I’m a little rare that I’m a woman entrepreneur. We women tend to be planners and organizers for our trips.
I commend you for making the bold move into the space. Much can be solved by better technology.
Your site looks like a good start. Easier search and better navigation are a must. Also its hard to tell where these properties are located. You hit a big number with 200K+ rentals, but what do you get out of the transaction?
Anyway, best of luck in the New Year!
Happy New Year, Bill ,TJ, and everybody!
I like it.I will try
@travel_alot “If it were that easy, those same portals would offer “Availability” within their own Search criteria.”
I agree, it’s not so easy, for anyone. The problems are two-fold:
1) Actually getting the price right — in the case of HomeAway, you may have a rate scheme that incorporates midweek days, weekends, full weeks, min lengths of stay…. If you want to stay for one and a half weeks, there’s some maths to do and a lot to consider — for one, what if the stay also crosses tariffs and therefore has a combination of different price levels on top of those midweek and weekend prices.
2) Searching results en-masse and checking the price for a particular period, while getting the result back within a second or two.
HomeAway has the same problems as screen scrapers — they are both stuck to lesser and greater extents with plain text price plans.
HomeAway have fantastic rate breakdowns (the best, I think), but doesn’t provide a way of searching against them effectively, and no means to quote for individual stays via the calendars. Their search is based on the weekly rate. What if you want to stay for a weekend?
Off a cursory look, both Vast and Otalo’s ‘refine by price’ option appears to adopt the ‘weekly price’ shorthand as well (I may be mistaken — hopefully they can clarify). This is the major drawback to HomeAway’s search, and there’s little point to duplicating these inefficiencies as providing precise search on price and availability is always going to be more important than volume, once you pass a certain threshold. Don’t tell me you have 100,000 properties — just show me the five I’m looking for. One “perfect” result is better than ten perfect results, if you have to trawl through a hundred “adequate” results (and their respective calendars…) to find those ten.
Once you accept this, then it follows that if you can’t add value to the data owners themselves, then you can’t really expect to add meaningful value to the consumer, either, by merely aggregating all those results. And that’s out philosophy starting out.
The aggregated search should strive to be faster and more accurate than the individual sites, and provide a rich context. As travel_alot pointed out, there are a lot of holes in search and few portals or agencies are covering all the bases (fundamentally a fast, uncomplicated search on availability, geography and actual holiday price)
People are really buzzing since the HomeAway round and sites are rushing to launch. We’re currently in private alpha and not in a rush, but there’s a lot of interesting points of view here, and I’d like to add some previews to our homepage in case any commentators in this thread want to take a peak. I need to get approval from all the investors first but check back tomorrow and hopefully I can post a link in this thread.
cheers,
This site is amazing – very well done interface.
The map and region links navigation is fantastic.
Being able to scroll the photos without going to the detail page is great. The detail pages themselves are great.
Of course, like any search, its relying on the data being culled to be useful and accurate, but that is true with any search.
?????? amazing? appaling think is probably closer to the mark, the first 3 properties I clicked on “were not available”
dreadful search parameters, no direct contact with owners agents…..another third party loading up charges that evetually are filtered to the property owner………
just had a look at aholidayhouse as mentioend above, very cool slick site and I emailed them apparently the design concept was inhouse and they had an outside firm do the coding……very nice…..but only based in Aus
Hey, someone responded to your article: http://blog.vis...a-big-business/
It’s a nice attempt, however creating and especially maintaining a reliably accurate aggregator website is such a technical challenge! I believe it will not happen til there is a common shared database of holiday rentals that exposes formalized API to third parties.
One note: you can call Otalo a holiday rental aggregator, but calling it “The Vacation Home Search Engine” is misleading – it does not even allow a full-text keyword search.
Vitaly
http://www.Holi...ertising.co.uk/
Seems like they are just another portal with intentions of branding themselves as a search engine, as it is a stronger brand. We have had some initial success with google base. There seems to be a monstrous influx of well funded portals into the space, but I think only a few localized ones will last as the others will be overshadowed by Orbitz, Expedia, and Hotels.com who have recently emerge in the market and posted big numbers.
I still think the trick for Vacation Rental & Resort managers is to optimize and improve their own site, and use portals for leverage to maintain high occupancy rates during slow periods. I found this interactive VR and Resort site test helpful when determining my site’s strengths and weaknesses.
http://bookt.co.../SiteScore.aspx