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

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/

dreadful search parameters, no direct contact with owners agents…..another third party loading up charges that evetually are filtered to the property owner………

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.

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,

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!

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.

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 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 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.).

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.

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

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