Myrtle Beach Message Board

Expedia bought HomeAway, VRBO, and VacationRentals.com in November, 2015 for $3.9 Billion. On February 19, 2016, they implemented a a service fee of between 4% to 9% on top of the listed rates if you book through directly through their website portals instead of the owner. You can avoid these fees if you book directly through the owners.

Expedia now owns Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Travelocity.com, Hotwire.com, Trivago.com, and Orbitz.com (among others). They are becoming quite the monopoly for online housing bookings.

Thought I would give you the heads up to avoid these fees.

MichaelB

Michael, thanks so much for all the information. WOW! I had no idea all this was happening!

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Thanks for the detailed information, MichaelB!

My parents have a condo on VRBO. Over the past 2 years, VRBO has implemented many ridiculous changes to their website and their policies - so much so that my parents are no longer renewing their membership after it expires in July. VRBO brought in a ton of renters years ago (and several repeat renters year after year) but the cons outweigh the pros. VRBO posted about their new fee system on their website and it basically says the fees are to pay for their advertising! My parents don't want to enable online booking. There's a rental office on the main floor of their condo building and that's who the renters book through. My parents feel as if they're being forced to enable online booking and other features because of the new rating system VRBO has in place. If you don't enable certain features on VRBO or have a high enough rating, your listing doesn't even show up when customers search for places. It's asinine.

Sorry for the rant! I could go on all day about how mad VRBO makes me now, lol.

Great to know. Thanks for sharing.

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