VRBO and AIRBNB have met their match: Google Vacation Rentals

[Collin Hays]

I've been waiting to post this for a while, as the details were a bit fuzzy.  But there's a new sherif in town.  Google the term "Google Vacation Rentals". You will see various properties listed for any area that you choose.  Below that, you will see the various sites on which you can rent the property.  VRBO, Airbnb, and best of all, direct sites! Our site, CabinsNearGatlinburg.com, is fully integrated, meaning it is one of the booking sites listed, for our geographic service area. Currently, there is no charge for this service (but don't hold your breath very long).  

This is a potential life raft for all STR owners who have been hijacked by the ever-increasing fees imposed by VRBO and AIRBNB. It will take a while for this opportunity to fully unfold, as it's a bit clunky at the moment, but things could look a lot different in the platform space a year from now.

If you own any Airbnb stock, this might be a good time to sell it. 

Happy Day!

[Ryan Moyer]

I dunno, seems like a long shot to become some great savior.  Possible, but long-shot.

Google Vacation Rentals is not new.  It's been around for a while.  Since 2019, actually.  The problem is it sucks, it barely works, it's surprisingly unintuitive for something so simple, and barely any guests actually use it.

Which is kind of the same reason we're not discussing this on Google+ while wearing our Google glasses and talking about which version of Google Stadia is best to put into our homes as we communicate with our cleaners through Google Hangouts.

While google obviously has a few big hits like Maps/Flights/Gmail, the majority of google releases follow the same pattern of great technology, horrible interface, no marketing, and eventual abandonment by Google.  Their departments are segregated so the new ones don't learn anything from the successful ones, their teams tend to skew engineer heavy with little thought for user experience, and their products rarely integrate in a sensible way since they are so segregated.  Google hangouts was technically by far the best messenger technology ever created, but if faded into obscurity and died like so many other google products.

I had some hope for GVR at the start, but it's clearly got one of the crappy teams and not one of the good ones.  They took something that's extremely easy to design an intuitive interface for and somehow screwed it up.  It's bulky, convoluted, un user friendly, un host friendly.  Has anyone here ever booked a trip with GVR as a guest?  Of course not.  It sucks.

This reminds me of Vero.  Remember Vero?  Of course not.  Vero was an Instagram alternative that all the IG photographers flocked to because it had a more creator friendly algorithm/feed.  If you were in the photography groups, you heard about it every day.  It seemed like everyone was using it, and it was the next big thing.  Photographers spent a whole year trying to gain a foothold there.  But no one ever sold anything there.  Why?  Because it was only other photographers on there.  It seemed like it was popular, because in the photography bubble it was all the rage.  But in the broader market of actual users and real potential clients, no one even know what it was.

That's GVR so far. All the rage in host circles. If you're an STR host you've been hearing about it for 2 years now, all the time. But everyone using GVR is hosts, not guests. And even hosts aren't actually using it to book trips. Because it sucks.

Maybe they'll turn it around, but the current team they have working on it certainly seems to be one of their teams that spends all their time on back-end tech and none on user experience like all the other failed google products, so I'm not optimistic.