Benoit Marketing

The vacation rental marketplace is gearing up to go after the hospitality players. This very fragmented frontier of lodging is poised to be the next major online growth opportunity. Hundreds of millions in venture capital have flowed into the category in recent years, and new research from PhoCusWright reveals why.

Vacation rentals represent a rich landscape of property management companies and individual homeowners with low online penetration but plenty of ambition. Say goodbye to one-week minimum stays, hefty deposits and BYOB (“bring your own bedsheets”). Today’s innovative vacation rental players, no longer content with the US $24 billion market, are starting to think, market and distribute like hotels. And several new technologies and online services have emerged to turn that ambition into bona fide business.

New PhoCusWright research presents the first comprehensive sizing and analysis of the complex, fragmented, often overlooked, and usually underestimated vacation rental market. PhoCusWright’s Vacation Rental Marketplace: Poised for Change delivers sweeping analysis of the more than $24 billion vacation rental market.

Just 12% of vacation rentals were booked online in 2007, but this will change significantly as vacation rentals challenge traditional hotels and resorts for the leisure consumer. Online players and vacation rental management companies are investing in online distribution and technology as the first step in the competition.