HomeAway / VRBO Service Fee

[Monika Haebich]

Just saw the (pretty harsh) results from a survey about the new VRBO service fee, and I was curious to see what you all thought of this.

Has the new fee been affecting your vacation rental bookings? Are any of you planning on switching to Airbnb or another listing site? 

[Robert R.]

I own Cabins in Gatlinburg Tennessee. For the past 5 years I received 80% of my rentals from Homeaway/VRBO. Last year I put our places on flipkey/trip advisor. At this time 95% of my rentals now come from flipkey/trip advisor. 

When my 2 recent listings were going to expire on Homeaway, I paid to keep one and let the other expire. The expired one I put on their highway robbery program of them taking 10% of the rental for each rental. Of course I now receive only 150 page views a month on the one I paid for and 700 on the 10% listing! I raised my rates on the 10% listing and only had one rental at each property from Vrbo this month. 

It is evident to me that Homeaway is money hungry. Why send inquiries to paid listings. They pocket that money and give them to the 10% listings. 

One other point. I have always had good reviews and lots of them. The paid homeaway listing gets very few page views. The same property always comes up in the top 20 on flipkey or trip advisor searches. 

We are currently putting together our own website for previous guests so they can skip the lousy booking fees. 

We do not us airbb due to their policy of allowing a renter to back out 5 days before for a full refund. 

Hope this factual information helps.