HomeAwayReviews 1,751

The 3 Best Alternatives to HomeAway and VRBO
Ingrid Genest is a travel blogger specializing in alternative lodging trends, marketing, and advertising including Vacation Rentals, Inns, B & B's, private rooms, and sublets.

With the recent acquisition of HomeAway by travel giant Expedia, which also includes flagship sister sites VRBO and VacationRentals.com, comes a slew of changes that has vacation rental advertisers seriously questioning value. Here is a glimpse at just a few of the problems at HomeAway leaving owners and property managers scratching their heads for viable alternatives:

- Expensive pay-for-positioning packages that do not convert to increased inquiries and bookings

- The heavy-handed push toward a "one-size-fits-all" booking and quotable rates model (think hotel)

- Mandatory traveler booking fees offering no particular benefit for Owners or their Guests

- Ever changing search algorithms forcing advertisers to play by HomeAway's rules, or risk having their listings pushed to the bottom of the pile

I have 2 properties on HomeAway and have barely been booking for the summer season!
Because of their greed, renters are turned off, and I as an owner will definitely NOT sign on
With them again! First it was taking the damage protection out of my hands ( I am the owner after all) and now imposing a ridiculous fee on our renters! I am looking for alternative sites or maybe one of us can be creative, begin a new and more honest
Business!

I joined Homeaway as a new property owner to advertise my rental. Their website clearly states in their FAQ that new listings will appear on their website in about 2 hours. After creating my listing I waited 24 hours and nothing appeared on the website. I called customer service and they told me that the 2 hours listed on the website wasn't true and it would actually take 5 - 7 business days for the listing to be approved. In addition to their high subscription fee I also paid for a 30 day "featured" listing. Subtracting the 5 - 7 business days for the listing to appear, I would actually end up with an 21 - 23 day day featured listing. There are also a lot of hidden fees that the don't disclosed to you until after you sign up. I cancelled my account.

We don't use VRBO booking service - never have, don't want to. Happy doing business the way I always have.

However, when prospects see our home page there is a "button" that says "How To Pay Safely". Push that button and up pops this:

"This owner doesn't offer online booking through VRBO's checkout. You won't be eligible for our Book with Confidence Guarantee.
Never use instant money transfer services such as Western Union and MoneyGram.
Learn more"

So, gosh darn. Even though I have many, many positive reviews, and have been on VRBO/HomeAway for five years, someone considering my property might just think - No confidence. No guarantee. Oh my God! Let's look elsewhere.

And I think they are looking elsewhere. My inquiries and bookings are way down...

I will not be renewing. Too bad. It's been a good ride. I will be emailing all of my past guests to let them know, and to suggest they not patronize these a**holes.

Cheers.

Homeaway claims its fees are only 4-6%, but my customers are being quoted 9%, and I have to pay 5% of my total sales. It makes for a total of 14%+ in fees. There is no indication that the fees have created service or more advertizing. Since the fees came into effect, my inquiries and bookings have plummeted. If there are alternative travel listing sites, I would like to know it because the fees have become absolutely excessive! Stay Away if you can!

By now we have all caught onto HomeAway/VRBO/Expedia's schemes. This has been in the works for years as any of us know who have been forced to do things with the sites due to "customers wanting it". It never mattered what "us" as homeowners wanted. I was even told once that as a homeowner I was not a customer (shocking), but now I get it. We have choices and I have spent time looking at them. I have 5 rentals with HomeAway/VRBO for now. I have put one rental on Trip/Advisor...$400 for the year and they don't charge you extra for their other sites. They don't charge the customers any fees when you have an annual subscription and you bill your customers directly (site has good functionality). I am testing another property on AirBNB (site not as good, but workable)where I have chosen no annual fee and they charge me 3% fee on booked reservations and they also charge the renter. In the end we have all been disrespected by HomeAway/VRBO and even if changing I lose some functionality and may even end up having the new companies charge the fee to my customers... I feel good knowing I have enough self respect to leave a company that clearly does not value us as home owners. The fact that they don't communicate to us until a month after they put the fee in place and still make the fee look confusing proves that out. Another item they forget to mention in the communication yesterday is that only about 55% of the properties on HomeAway/VRBO are having the fees charged to customers. The other 45% have not signed up for online booking/online payments, thus no customer fees are being charged. Remove the online booking/online payment function (if you can) while you decide what is best for you.

I enquired with Homeaway about increasing my subscription and all of a sudden the enquiries dried up and my advert dropped in the lisitngs - seems an attempt to force me to pay more money, I contacted them and useless - WORST CUSTOMER SERVICE EVER EXPERIENCED, I have been advertising with them for years and only warrants a cut n paste e-mail. I for one am off, they are just rip off merchants and not interested to retain customers,

We booked a house through homeaway twice for the same trip and both times they were canceled after we signed the contract. The first was about 3 months prior to our dates. The second house we got they called 4 days before we were about to leave and said they double booked us. We even called 6 days before to confirm and they confirmed with us. They were very rude and they put us in a bad situation. This whole process made us a nervous wreck. I will never use this site again!

I was scammed by a fradulant rental property reservation using HomeAway.com. The scammer made everything appear offical through HomeAway. I was ensured that it was 100% secure through HomeAway and was sent an email confirming my reservation request and detailing how to make the payment; the email was from homeawaybooking and had their offical emblem on it. After I sent the payment I received no further information. When I submitted a customer service request to HomeAway they responding that the reservation was cancelled, no contact to me, no refund. When I again tried to contact HomeAway about fradulant activity and getting a refund their customer service was the worst that I have ever dealty with! After wasting close to an hour on the phone, being transferred here and there, and repeating my information over and over to representatives with hearing problems and poor English, I was told by billing that they could not help me and were transferring me back to customer service, at which point I was disconnected. I would not recommend use of HomeAway ever based on the fact that they are allowing fradulant activity on their website and taking no action to resolve this or assists those who fell victum to the scam.

I am a property owner and have been advertising my lisiting since 2008 through Homeaway.com which also includes VRBO and a variety of other sites both nationally and internationally. I pay for the best type of listing they offer and until several months ago have been very happy with the results I was getting. Apparently they changed their policy and now charge the traveler a mandatory fee if they book a property through their website. Prior to this policy, I was able to offer the traveler paymnet through PayPal and I absorbed the fee that was charged. My listing always appeared on the first page of the results search for my vacation home location and many times it was number one. Since many of my clients chose not to book through Homeaway, that knocked my listing so far back in the search results that inquiries came close to a screeching halt! I called them on several occasions and the representatives attempted very lame excuses why my listing is buried but the truth is, they have grown so big, they cannot handle them all. I get it! Business is business but there are many listings that came much later than mine and they way ahead of mine. At this juncture I just want to cancel my subscription with them and advertise on a site that isn't choked with hundreds of the same type of listing. When I requested a pro-rated refund from the company, I am told they don't think I will get one, so I ask for a supervisor and, of course, none are available! What a surprise! They took my phone number, assigned a case number (I'm probably not the only one complaining about this) and someone "will get back to me". By the way, it took 15 minutes of searching my listing account to even get a telephone number to call them. If you are a property owner I strongly suggest you advertise elsewhere. If you are a traveler, DO NOT BOOK DIRECTLY THROUGH HOMEAWaY! You can book directly through the owner and not pay that ridiculous fee! I will definitely NOT renew my subscription when it expires and I hope their greed comes back to bite them in the $#*!! I would rate them -10 stars if it were an option!

Up until this past weekend, I had good luck (apparently that is rare) with HomeAway.com and VRBO.com - I was not happy about their sudden increase in fees as most homeowners have stated here, but my number of bookings seemed to justify the fees overall.
This past weekend, I hosted 11 people, Mr. Younan Hasado, who caused well over $2,500 in damages to my home. A kitchen cabinet was completely torn from the wall, another cabinet door was split in half, there are missing shelves to the refrigerator, two broken windows, two broken window sills, excessive staining on the carpet, vomit on the furniture, a large hole in my vinyl siding, a bent metal entry door (which will not close and poses a safety issue) and the cleaning company is going to charge me double ($175) for the 16 bags of garbage - steam cleaning the furniture and carpets and cleaning all the vomit from every trash can and bathroom in the house.
As with all of my rentals, I selected to have guests pay for the insurance policy to cover damages. Beware, this is a scam as the insurance will only cover for ACCIDENTAL losses and they can refuse to reimburse for ANY damages they consider or deem as not accidental. Guess which category my claim falls under?
Both the insurance company and HomeAway.com are unwilling to take any responsibility and their answers are to refer me to each other. Although both are making money from the homeowners and guests, when it comes down to an issue for their failure to vet out the guests or provide honest and transparent information, neither will protect or defend the homeowner. I am left holding the bag and will be forced to hire an attorney, pay for the attorney, court costs and collection fees and in the end, will likely never recoup a dime.
HomeAway.com should be ashamed of their business model and scam-like predatory practices in roping the guests and homeowners into purchasing a fake insurance for $59 per reservation. To date, the insurance has received over $1,900 in fees from my reservations and it is only March.
HomeAway.com presents itself as a legitimate company and decrees how wonderful their process, customer services and hosting possibilities are, but they fail to tell both the guest and homeowner that in the event of a loss or problem, you are on your own.
I advise anyone reading this to pull their listings ASAP and at all costs, avoid the insurance company CSA Travel Protection Insurance Company.
Ms. Rose

Homeaway insists their subscribers don't want an online classified ad service, we want hotel-style massive bookings. BUT as a VRBO subscriber with one home to rent, I want an online classified service. Never had a problem with the renters, they've never had a problem with me. The business model for VRBO was about performing a service for the vacation rental owner. Not any more, it's about how VRBO/Expedia can take a piece of the action without any of the risk we all assume as the owners, from bad renters, through to vacant time slots, through to costs of keeping a vacation home up and running. When VRBO/Homeaway starts offering to pay a portion of my realty taxes or insurance, I might consider cutting them a piece of my pie, but until then, one has to question the new business model they are pursuing. And look for alternatives.

I have multiple properties on home away. Since the merger last year the site has deteriorated and become more expensive for guest and Host. The customer service is actually ok on the reservation side. However the payment side Yapstone no customer service for fraud. They DO NOT do credit card verification. I have had four fraud credit cards the past few months. I am lucky as I have so many previous guest that I have been able to keep the houses going. I am slowly closing my accounts and moving to Air BNB model and Home escape. The first does verify credit card. Owners please beware. DO NOT take last minute rentals with out an ID then still risky. As one had a fake ID. I would advise if doing reservation that is close to the date to at least get them to pay by air bnb as less scams, I have so far never had a scam payment on Air BNB. That being said I have had fake adds made of my houses on this site but the company dealt with that fast. For anyone with fake credit cards you can travel the world for free as no follow up is done and you will have a month before they even start to look at the charges. So for the scammers Home away is the place to be. I would advise any owner to open up other accounts as this and having so much repeat business has saved me. If this would have happened when I first started out on Homeaway. I would have been ruined. They should start having trust and safety as part of the goal for the now and the future.