I'd personally love a travel site that aggregates Airbnb & VRBO & Hotels. Listing everything a city has to offer on a single site could be a real differentiator to sites like Kayak.
Tripping is the top metasearch site for vacation rentals with over 1 million homes worldwide. We also have the richest data set in the industry, so it'll be fun to see how our data compares with BeyondStays.
We've explored integrating other property types on Room77.com in addition to our hotel metasearch but there are some things we encountered that we need to work through first:
- Hotel metasearch is a real-time pricing and booking option. VRBO and AirBnB by and large are lead generation based so you don't have real time availability on a majority of the properties. This means that a lot of the listings may already be booked and you wouldn't know until you contact the owner.
- Location accuracy is a challenge. Home owners don't want to provide exact addresses due to privacy reasons so for a lot of properties, owners have chosen to provide an "approximate" location which leads to a lot of properties in a neighborhood sharing the same exact lat/long and a lot of stacked pins or clusters on a map.
For reference, here's a general idea of the number of property types: 300,000+ hotels, 550,000+ vacation homes, 300,000+ airbnb listings (lots of cross listing with vacation rental sites for sure), 50,000+ hostels = ~1M properties bookable after deduplication.
That would be awesome. Especially when you're going to markets that aren't that big and have a ton of Airbnb's and whatnot. It'd be great to have one place list the entire realm of places to stay.
Tripping is the top metasearch site for vacation rentals with over 1 million homes worldwide. We also have the richest data set in the industry, so it'll be fun to see how our data compares with BeyondStays.