Effective Ways to Find the Right Vacation Rental - Part 1


If you ever booked a vacation rental before, chances are you used one of the most common websites to reserve vacation homes such as BRBO, HomeAway, and Airbnb. There are a handful of other ways to go about reserving vacation homes than simply logging into the big-name sites, ways that you may not even know about or even considered. Did you that sites like Hotels.com, Expedia.com, TripAdvisor, and even Google.com can be used to book vacation rentals? Well, know you now, and we’ll tell you how to do it.

With searching for hotels using Google, you can filter the search to show only results containing vacation rentals. This “vacation rental filter” was actually being tested officially last year and is now available in many major cities. Test it out yourself the next time you’re searching for vacation homes. In the search bar, type “hotels in Springdale, UT”, as an example. Look for a drop-down menu called “Accommodation Type”, click on it, and from there choose the option called “vacation rentals”. Now you’ll be looking at various choices only associated with vacation homes in that area that will include maps, photos, amenities, and prices. When you select one of the options, you’ll be redirected to a different site to actually book it (like Hotels.com, Booking.com, Orbitz.com or others). Some listings can be booked on more than one site, and all that apply will populate. In some cases, rather than redirecting you, it will simply show you the direct contact number or email address of the person (or property management company) who owns the property you’re interested in. If Google has not yet applied this vacation homes filter to the city you are inquiring about, then the “vacation rentals” drop-down box will not appear as an option.

One of the reasons this is a great resource for travelers desiring to stay in vacation homes is that it allows you to quickly and easily compare prices from many different sites that list that same property so that you can get the best deal available online. Different travel sites offer different cancellation policies so consider viewing your desired listing on multiple booking sites to see if you can get a better overall contract in addition to price.

Now let’s discuss search engines that are made specifically for vacation homes and rentals. HomeAway.com and VRBO.com are two reliable sites that you should definitely become familiar with if you aren’t already. Even though vacation rentals are increasing in popularity every year, it seems that many travelers are still unaware of these two helpful sites, in particular. Kayak is great in its own right and it’s wonderful that they now have a vacation rentals option, when it comes to vacation homes, the two mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph are just as helpful, if not more. There are even a few more that are wonderful resources for vacation rental searches, like Tripping.com and AlltheRooms.com

Tripping.com is, as far as we know, the vacation rental search engine that contains the largest number of listings in its database - over 10 million. Basically, it’s like Kayak but just for vacation homes. AlltheRooms.com is another similar site that collects information and listing from lots of different sites and shows them to you in your searches. You can customize your search however you want and search for specifics like homeshares, apartments, luxury, and even couch-surfing. Similar to the Google search method, when you click on a listing it will redirect you to another site to complete the booking.

This article will continue as Effective Ways to Find the Right Vacation Rental - Part 2.

vacation homes springdale ut

Effective Ways to Find the Right Vacation Rental - Part 1

Vacation Homes


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