What Frustrates Travelers Most About Booking Vacation Rentals Online? If I had to answer this question with one short answer: hidden fees. In a May 2026 survey of more than 1,000 US travelers, 61% named hidden or unexpected fees as their top booking frustration, far ahead of anything else (Fullstory). Close behind for vacation rentals specifically, […]
Arkansas’ Lake Hamilton, Ten Minutes From Everything Three nights on Lake Hamilton, a thermal soak under stained glass, and why the best lake stays near Hot Springs National Park are the ones tucked just out of town.For a moment, I lost track of time.I was floating on my back in a thermal pool at Quapaw […]
Why Guests Abandon Vacation Rental Bookings and How to Win Them Back Roughly eight out of ten people who start a travel booking online never finish it. For a vacation rental, that means most of the guests who liked your photos enough to pick dates and click “Book” are walking away, and many of them […]
Direct vs. OTA Is the Wrong Argument, And These Numbers Prove It Nobody told me direct booking was supposed to be hard. I didn’t know it was a whole debate with sides and conference panels. I was employee number four at a resort that barely existed yet, and every booking we had belonged to Airbnb. […]
AI Search Didn’t Change the Rules, It Just Raised the Stakes on the Boring Stuff A family planning a trip to the Smokies used to open Google and type “cabin rentals Gatlinburg hot tub.” Now they open ChatGPT and ask, “where should six of us stay near the Smokies with a hot tub and good […]
Five Parts, One Loop: What a Vacation Rental Marketing System Actually Looks Like I can usually find the broken part within an hour of walking in. Not because I’m clever, but because it’s almost always the same break that I’ve seen every time I’ve audited marketing operations for short term rentals. The operator sits me […]