Vacation Rental Industry Amenities
November 30th, 2007 by Carl Query carl@flipkey.comAt FlipKey we like to frequently remind ourselves of the differences between hotels and vacation homes, and then think about how to leverage our industry’s uniqueness to promote vacation rentals. Today I’m going to talk about one of the larger differentiating factors between a hotel and a vacation home - the amenities.
When I book an average hotel room, I don’t need to think about the amenities I am getting because I already know exactly what to expect. A 25″ tv made in 1995, a phone, a coffee pot with those terrible coffee packets, tiny bottles of shampoo, etc. However, this is not true in the vacation rental industry. Amenities vary wildly amongst vacation homes, and they are an essential part of the selection process.
The “human touch” of vacation rental amenities is part of what makes vacation rentals so much better than hotels. However, this is also a large factor in making the selection process so difficult for many guests. The problem is two-fold:
- Too many amenities to choose from makes it difficult to decide which are the most important.
- Too little congruency amongst similar amenity descriptions found across multiple properties presents a real challenge when trying to compare apples to apples
Problem #1 is one of user choice. Only the individual guest can run the calculus that lets them decide whether they would rather have the smaller house with the Jacuzzi and the Grill, or opt for the larger house with the pool table and the Xbox 360. Problems of preference rarely have a universal solution.
Problem #2, however, is one that is solvable if the industry worked together to create a standard amenity taxonomy.
Allow me to illustrate the problem more clearly with an example:
Ben is taking his family to Disney World and is looking for a house in the Orlando area for his wife and 5 kids. One of the features that Ben wants to keep the family occupied at night is a nice home theater room. He wants surround sound, a 50″+ plasma television, and plenty of comfortable seating. However, upon sifting through the endless pages of available vacation rentals in the Orlando area, Ben sees property listings that use all sorts of different terms to describe what may (or may not) be a home theater system:
- DVD
- DVD/TV
- HDTV
- Color TV
- Cable TV
- LCD
- Surround System
- And many more variations
Ben quickly notices that he has no way to tell which properties actually have a home theater room. Does the listing with “HDTV” even have a DVD player? Is the “Home Theater System” in High Definition? This problem is not unique to Ben’s situation. Ambiguity reigns in the amenity listings for most properties found online.
What this mostly comes down to is the larger industry-wide issue regarding the lack of standardization. It’s something we have thought about a lot at FlipKey, and an issue that we would like to see solved one day.
December 1st, 2007 at 5:33 am
I agree, this is a real problem, but maybe not insurmountable. Technical solutions will get you some of the way, for a start.
That is, the problem of working out that ‘TV’ and ‘HDTV’ are similar, and clustering them accordingly, is basically the same problem as the online retailers have in finding ‘related products’. Not only have amazon/ebay/froogle/etc. got *very* good at solving that over the past decade, there are also companies dedicated entirely to dealing with it, and providing plug-in services.
Then you get into the problem that websites often don’t include the full list of amenities, just the things that they think will win them customers. And they’ll often be too general, saying ‘fully-equipped kitchen’ rather than listing the oven, the microwave, etc. But property managers do have complete inventories of everything in the house - they need to, so they can tell when something gets broken or goes missing. It’s just a question of persuading them to open up those lists to the world.
Anyway, I’m excited that flipkey is thinking about these problems. Just don’t despair; you may not be able to solve them completely, but if you find the right approach you can probably find some ways of improving the current situation.
December 6th, 2007 at 8:51 am
Dan - you made a good point that many property managers do have complete inventories - they just don’t share them as well as they should. For example, not including a bread maker or a slow cooker in a listing may not appear too much of an omission, but to a renter comparing like properties in a crowded market it could be a deal maker.
An inventory doesn’t have to clutter up a listing - having it available as a pdf download can be sufficient to add value to the listing and attract more visitors. This gives managers and owners the opportunity to add more detail that may not be appropriate on a traditional web page.