Finding a Holiday Rental where Quality Counts

With the trend of international travel tending ever more towards visits to a foreign land that highlight both a sense of place and local experiences, more and more visitors are seeking an alternative to homogenized hotel or resort accommodation. Planning their trips online, growing numbers of individuals are turning to holiday rentals, cottages and villas in which to stay when abroad.

The logic behind this trend is clear. Visitors not only want to feel they have a home away from home, with the luxury of space and full facilities and amenities, but wish to escape the feeling of being regarded simply as a “key”, the term used by hotels to describe guests. By renting a holiday house, villa or holiday rental directly from the owner, visitors can gain inside knowledge and tips directly from the locals, can assimilate themselves into indigenous cultures and communities with much greater ease, and can blend into their destination. The added bonus, of course, is that holidays in such vacation rentals often work out cheaper than stays in hotels – especially when two or more are travelling together, when friends plan a shared vacation, or when parents are planning a family holiday overseas.

The vast variety of lodgings, and their geographical spread, is impressive. Holidaymakers can book a fully catered pool villa among the rice paddies of rural Thailand, a cosy chalet directly on the ski slopes of France, an African reserve camp, a houseboat in India, a beachfront house in Spain, a villa in Italy, and much, much more. The choice today is enormous. Furthermore, we now have the choice of a self-catering house, a fully catered villa, staffed properties or remote cabins in the wilderness…

We caught up with the people behind the established holiday rentals website Getawayearth.com which highlights holiday rentals, villas, apartments and cottages across the globe, available for rent directly from the owner. They focus on putting the personal back into travel, and ensuring that the accommodation options offered place an emphasis on ensuring the best possible guest experience. We asked them what motivated them to create their niche in the international vacation rentals market. Their response was enlightening:“Well, with young families, we often look to stay at a holiday home rather than a hotel or resort when we travel. We all like the space these afford us, the feeling of being independent yet also part of the local community, and, admittedly, the fact that holiday rentals generally offer much better value for money than hotel rooms or suites. But to answer your specific question, we set the site up some years ago now as we had - on several occasions - been disillusioned by some of the homes we had booked. It seemed to us that many sites simply took a fee or a commission off holiday villa owners, and then allowed them to create their own listing without any quality checks. We wanted to create the reference site for properties where owners really cared about not only their holiday home, but in particular guest satisfaction. We wanted to highlight owners who really do add the personal touch to bookings, owners who are keen to ensure that their visitors have a clear and detailed understanding of the property, the region they are visiting, and have an in-depth knowledge of the locality.”

As they have grown, they are now pushing this quality control further, with ratings to be awarded to each property listed, based on previous guest reviews, the completeness of the listing, the extra information provided on the location and setting, the frequency with which availability calendars are maintained, and a host of other factors. They expect the new grading system to be in place within the second quarter of 2012, if not earlier.

We welcome such an approach. Whilst the majority of holidaymakers will visit review sites such as Tripadvisor before making any definitive hotel or vacation rental booking, and whilst we feel that the majority of such reviews are realistic, there are obvious disadvantages to sites owned by travel companies and where reviews can be written by anybody – not necessarily just former guests - and where occasional shenanigans persist, as highlighted in such documentaries such as “Return of the Tripadvisors.”

Whichever listing sites you browse to find your dream holiday rental home, and whichever reviews site you consult to check up on notes from former guests, the vast majority of holidaymakers who book their first holiday in a private house or villa instead of a hotel will almost consistently stick to renting such properties when on vacation in the future. As one mother of three said, from the poolside of the beach villa she was renting in the south of Thailand, “Just look around! We have our own private pool, a huge tropical garden, and we’re right on the beach. We’ve got a Thai massage booked for five this afternoon, and a cook is coming to make us a birthday dinner for our daughter this evening. And we’re paying less than the guests over there are paying for a one bedroom hotel suite! I know I sound like the person next to you on the flight over, telling you they paid less for their ticket than you did, but here we feel we’ve simply been upgraded!”