vacation-rentals.com – The best place for information in a snapshot!

www.vacation-rentals.com, being one of the top holiday rental sites, does more than justice to its reputation. Talking of its reputation, a lot of my friends told me that here is a site that could give you information almost in an instant. On seeing the home page of www.vacation-rentals.com, I could more than agree with what they said.

Do not go berserk on getting bombarded with details on the home page. It surely can be intimidating for a new traveler to come up against lines of information presented to him. On reading this site, I came up with an easy way for people to make sense out of this site. With that being said, I still believe the web designers should have done their bit in making this site easy to read.

Here is why I think www.vacation-rentals.com can be popular amongst travelers

Why is Vacation-Rentals considered the best choice?

Just ignore the right section of the page, and all you get is pure information

The easiest way to make sense out of this site is by getting blindfolded in the right eye. Just do not look at the right section, at least on the home page, as that is not meant for you. That for me is one major drawback in this site, which we would discuss later. I believe that the homepage should have enough information readers can use. To its credit, this site’s homepage does present a lot of information.
Number of listings available per continent

Just as instantly, I could find the USA had 525 rentals listed, and the Caribbean Islands had about 57 rentals listed in them. This section of the home page will also tell you how many rentals are listed in each individual countries of that continent. Reading information could thus not get easier for any traveler, and you could then make your choice depending on what you want.

Are you really finicky on the number of options being provided to you? If that’s the case, you should be choosing United States that has 525 rentals, and be sure, you would be pampered for choice here. Do you wish to go to a place that is just quite out-of-the-box? You could look at places that do not have too many rentals. Whether those rentals are in those out-of-the-box locations, you would have to wait for some more time.

The point though is – This page does give you a lot of information in a very easy manner.

1079 rentals in all (26.12.2008)! But are they enough

This is one big question I had when I was greeted with the sight of 1079 rentals, I could possibly find in this site. Remember, I had absolutely no idea on where I had to go for my vacation in terms of the exact place, though I knew I wished to go to the Caribbean Islands. Just so to know if I had come to the right site, I clicked on Antigua and Barbuda to see what came up (Though I definitely did not wish to go here).

Instantly, I saw a list of places where I could find rentals. I found only 1 rental available in Clarkes Hill. Digging deep, I found that the information about this rental was presented in a manner that I would have liked. I did not require any second invitation to get clicking on the availability of rentals in Puerto Rico, and I was mighty surprised by what I saw?

I had video buttons that possibly indicated my preferences; about 8-9 of them. Let’s say I wanted a list of places that had pool facility and Jacuzzi. I just had to place a tick below the options provided, and I had the list of all the rentals that provided these facilities.

Quality of Information

As if all these benefits were not enough, I was also offered some top-drawer information on the rental itself. I just did not wish to face an anti-climax with the information on the rentals, and to that extent, I must say that this site did not disappoint me at all.

Area of Improvement

It really has to be the way the information has been presented. The intentions are right, but then look at the way information has been given to you off their pages. For me, it was an absolutely shabby effort. You just cannot have a website with links and links galore. For a naïve visitor, not only will this be intimidating, but it will also have him at a loss of what he needs to do.

Maybe, all this site should have had was a display of the continents and the number of listings they had for the continent. After someone clicking on the continents, it would then up another page that will display all the listings categorized place-wise. This, I believe would have the best option in structuring the content.

My Rating

Apart from the way information was presented, I did not find anything else missing in this site. But as they say, “1 bad negates 100 good things”, bad structuring of the information has indeed played a big role in bringing down my unbiased rating of this site. 6.5 out of 10 – That’s what this site gets from me.

While it scores on the concept and the thought, it loses a lot of marks on the designing and the implementation bit. Some improvements here, and this site could clearly be one of the best travel rental sites.

Conclusion

If you turn a blind eye to the fact that you would be pounded with information galore no sooner that you have stepped in this site, vacation-rentals.com is a real good one. This is a place where you would indeed get information at a fast clip. And trust when that happens, you would be able to take decisions fast!

This is review Nr 9 of the series vacation rentals websites reviews. Enjoy!

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