Edie S.

We have several homes that we manage and unfortunately, a couple of years ago, some of our property owners had heard of Air B&B and insisted that we try them. We now have lost half of our properties because Air B&B doesn't pay us and hence we cannot pay the property owners or our cleaning crews. The president of our company has had to get personal loans to cover the amounts that are due to be paid out to the property owners. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars. It has gotten to a point where every booking we receive through Air B&B has to be verified over the phone to make sure they have sent our money to the proper / working bank account. They are still holding a huge amount of money from 2 years ago.

If you are considering trying Air B&B, I recommend that you reconsider. VRBO/HomeAway is not any better either. These companies have gotten so big that they now control most of the Internet bookings and apparently are not capable of keeping themselves organized. If you are lucky enough to talk to someone that can actually communicate with you, you can expect rude service and even hang ups.

One thing I DO recommend is that even though both Air B&B and VRBO/HomeAway will not divulge the e-mail addresses or phone numbers of the renters until they are actually booked, once they have booked one of your houses, encourage them to book directly through YOU the next time they want to rent one of your houses. I send our clients a friendly e-mail once they check out and tell them how much they could have saved if they would have booked directly through us.