I’ve had great luck in renting appealing vacation homes through vrbo.com, one of many websites devoted to vacation rentals offered by their owners. (Vrbo and most of the other national heavyweights are owned by homeaway.com.) These websites act as classified sections for second homeowners who want to rent out their condos, cabins and houses to travelers. Until recently, the sites haven’t provided a review system that would allow candid comments from past renters. In the big picture, these sites would be much more valuable to consumers (and, as an extension, to trustworthy vacation rental owners who post on the sites) with an unfiltered system, similar to the one used on ebay.com to rate its sellers. A quick stroll through vrbo.com listings shows that the site is posting negative as well as positive reviews, as illustrated by this testy exchange about a condo in Grand Marais.

An Oct. 5 New York Times story addresses the topic of reliability (and questions how unfiltered those reviews are) and sites www.vrwd.org as one possible remedy-in-the-making. vrwd stands for Vacation Rental Watch Dog, and it allows renters to post their complaints unfiltered. The site is in its infancy — there are a total of 53 complaints about rentals in the United States so far. The site isn’t really a practical answer to the problem. But it may spur sites to allow more freewheeling exchanges in the comment sections. Any vacation rental horror stories out there? Recommendations?

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under consumer, vacation rentals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.