vacationsbyowner.com

www.vacationsbyowner.com  - Rentals directly from the owner!

I know that most rental sites worked on a commission basis. That is, you book a home and you would have to pay commissions to the site. Here was a site with a difference. www.vacationsbuyer.com allows owners to market the sites directly to travelers, thus ensuring travelers would not have to pay commissions at all.

Different yes, but is it what people really look for! Remember, by having the site help owners market their properties, an element of standardization is maintained. You would find the information is rather structured, and most importantly would have all the information pretty much in the same template.

In that sense, I had an apprehension that possibly I may not get the same quality of information across vacationsbyowner.com. I could have some owners displaying some information, whereas others would have felt the need of skipping some information. With these apprehensions in mind, I went about reading this site.

To be quite honest, what I found about www.vacationsbuyer.com was something completely opposite to what I had originally thought of this site.

What’s hot about www.vacationsbyowner.com ?

Concept

It has to be the concept that takes it all. www.vacationsbyowner.com immediately differentiates itself from all other sites in this domain by proclaiming that it was a site where owners had the opportunity to market their properties directly without any interference from the website itself.

Now, that was a welcome change, as I knew I would not have had to pay any commissions for the services offered by the site. Also, I was excited at the prospect of seeing some quality information being presented by the owners of the properties.

Featured Vacation Rentals

Unlike most other sites that offered the Featured Vacation Rentals on the homepage, I could see a motley group of houses in a link supported by the homepage. Just as I was curious, I read the tag line that said “Featured Vacation Rentals”. Trust those houses looked to be not visited often for sure. In reality though, I found out that they were just a step ahead of the first impression they gave. For a moment, I forgot that this site had listings directly by the owner, and so aesthetics would not have been given due attention!

All right, I got to know why the so-called bad looks of the home appeared that way. Fascinated by what vacationsbyowner.com had to offer me from then on, I thought this could indeed have been the place where I can find a rental to spend my vacation.

Good linking of information

Let’s talk a bit more on the home page. The home page of this site indeed took my breath away. I did not find myself hit by loads of information. Trust me, before visiting this site, I had been to tens of other sites that had this habit. The homepage could completely torpedo you to a barrage of information. Only some of the information was relevant with most others redundant at best!

I was shown a listing by different places. To be quite honest, there weren’t a lot by any stretch of imagination. But I liked the fact that this site had it in them to tell me that they only had listings in these many locations. To me, the honesty impressed me a lot and I decided to dig a touch deeper.

When I did go through the listings they had, I found that indeed good quality information was presented to me. I just did not have any reason to hate vacationsbyowner.com.

Listing of the Rental

I was able to find more than one listing for California, but what surprised me the most was the tabular manner in which data was presented. That’s new as I had never seen a site presenting data in a tabular format. This one did and won my acclaim almost immediately. All I then had to do was to click on a certain property based on what I saw off the table, and I had one full page of information. Everything I wanted to know about the property was mentioned. I just did not have to look anywhere else for information.

Areas of Improvement

Much as Vacations by Owner had to give me, I observed some areas of improvement in the site. Please note I am doing it with an unbiased eye and most of what you see here are hard facts.

Good categorization of locations but too less locations anyways – I am a person who tries to look through most things. Given such a backdrop, though the quality of information presented to me was 10 on 10, but there just were not enough locations to my liking.

Special Offers – One thing is for sure – You just cannot find special offers off this site. Trust it would be very difficult for you to even note one noteworthy offer.

Not all locations listed – I would have loved to see some locations of Middle East and Far East listed here. Some of those locations are popular tourist spots, and I fail to understand why this site missed out on them.

My Rating

The concept of this site is so unique and impressive, that I should not be giving any less than 5 out of 5 only for the concept. But then, I have got to be neutral in my assessment, and my unbiased judgment for this site would be 4 out 5. Where it misses out is – The number of locations and some other minus points as noted above!

Conclusion

As far as concept’s originality goes, this site is just the best. I have not heard of any site before, which has listings put on directly by the owner. Watch the space where you get a tabular listing of all rentals in a city. This is something I had never seen previously, and far away from being a gimmick, the table gives you quality data as well.

Vacationsbyowner.com is a must visit for all those people who do not wish to spend a lot of time on a travel site. Instead, they want to get full value for money on the site they visit.

This is review Nr 8 of the series vacation rentals websites reviews. Enjoy!

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October 20th, 2008 Posted by Rumi | Vacation Rentals Website Reviews | one comment