Marie S.

In the beginning... VRBO gave regular down to earth home owners an avenue to advertise their rental vacation homes to down to earth vacationers who wanted to get away from the commercialized, impersonalized mega property brokers. It was a marriage made in heaven! Owners paid VRBO a reasonable amount of money to provide a well run user friendly website to advertise their vacation rentals to prospective renters. At that point, renters contacted owners personally and the two (owners and renters) worked out the details on their own. Fast forward to today. VRBO raises its rates to owners (I pay over $1300 per home for platinum level on 5 homes) charges high credit card fees (I don't use credit cards because I don't want to raise my rates to cover the fees) and is charging renters a service fee to book through the website (no one knows what for) which amounts to 4-10% of the total balance. VRBO also makes it look like it is the owner charging the guest the service fee. This is very deceitful and VRBO is stating that all of their owners will be using their booking services by the end of 2016. Well this is one owner who will not! I just signed up one of my houses with Vacation Home Rentals an affiliate of Trip Advisor and I'm going to see how it goes. VRBO had a cash cow but got greedy. Vacationers will not be taken advantage of, they will just take their business elsewhere and so will owners.
VRBO better wise up and quit trying to be a bully or they'll end up playing by themselves.

I am so sick of turning on HGTV and seeing those "Brothers". They have worn out their welcome. Give the viewers something "Fresh".