Purchasing 1st Vacation Rental - Website help

[Ken Boone]

I am in the process of purchasing my first vacation rental.   Closing near the end of this month and I am trying to get all my ducks in a row.  The property was previously on a managed rental program and when I take over my wife and I are going to take over the management.  I have a photographer scheduled to be in there next week so I can get the photos done prior to closing.  I plan on posting on VRBO and AirBnB.  What are you guys doing as far as just having a website hosted to display your vacation rental.  Are you just going with any hosted provider?  Is there a way to have all the calendar's sync up between VRBO, AirBnB and a website?  Are there some hosted providers that specialize in websites for this type of thing?  Just looking for some feedback as to what some of you guys are doing.

Thank you.

[Shelby Pracht]

Congrats @Ken Boone! I use only Airbnb because it works super well in my market (we stay at 88-92% occupancy using just Airbnb, so I haven't even bothered to mess with VRBO). I set up a really simple wordpress website for myself that show the properties that I have, but then if someone wants to book, it directs them to Airbnb. I realize you make slightly less because your guests are paying those service fees, but the convenience and protection that they offer are worth it for my peace of mind. I DO like having the standalone website though. It's great because when you're networking or cruising around town, you can give people an easy domain name that they can remember to look up your property, instead of having to search through all of airbnb/vrbo.