Vacation rental managers and owners who have listings on HomeAway’s sites are reporting that HomeAway is cracking down on content in vacation rental listings that provides information to guests about how to contact the owner or manager directly to avoid paying HomeAway’s service/traveler fee.
In an email to customers, HomeAway said, “We will deactivate listings that contain messaging indicating that travelers are encouraged to pay outside of our reservation system.”
New listings on HomeAway are being closely checked against HomeAway’s “Marketplace Standards.” One manager who has other listings on HomeAway recently added a new group of listings and included an office photo to all the listings — both old and new. The photo was removed from the new listings, but not the existing ones.
However, individual owners are beginning to report changes to existing listings. It appears that HomeAway has initiated an effort to comb through existing listings searching for language, photo captions, URLs and phone numbers than lead travelers to contact managers directly.
HomeAway’s Terms and Conditions state, “Members agree not to encourage or advise a traveler to avoid or circumvent the service fee charged by HomeAway.”
We reached out to HomeAway to find out if there has been a change in processes for enforcement but have not yet received a response.
Unless I am missing something, these policies aren’t really new, just going through a strict enforcement…. and are the same as Airbnb and TripAdvisor….
Unless you are big enough, or in a small enough market to make it on your own, settle in for the ride
Okay, just got off the phone with VRBO-HomeAway host customer service… if we are paying the annual host subscription fee, we are allowed to include the URL of our own private sites within the listing description and in the area reserved for URL linkbacks. What we are NOT allowed to do is to use language in the listing itself – or on our own sites – that DIRECTLY ENCOURAGES the prospective guest to come and book on our private site in order to avoid paying the VRBO-HomeAway fees. In February, VRBO-HA instituted a new Guest Service Fee which ranges from 4 to 9 percent. So, yes, invite them to your site, and if they end up booking via your site and thereby circumventing the Guest Service Fee, so be it… acceptable gray area, and they will not chase that down. BUT, if you say come to my site, book directly, save the Guest Service Fee,then thats NOT a gray area, and a human rep will contact you and ask you to remedy the wording. If you do not remedy the wording within a prescribed time frame, THEN your listing will be deactivated.