The 10 Best Vacation Rental Sites for Travelers
The 10 Best Vacation Rental Sites for Travelers
Yes! Summer has arrived and Covid is coming to an end here in the United States. What to do next? You got your vaccine and apparently don’t care about that Covid 15 you gained. Who does after this year? Skip that Bikini and Speedo because you’re good with a swim shirt and board shorts. Let’s go to the beach! But maybe not so fast. You’re not ready for a crowded resort just yet. So now you’re looking for the best vacation house, apartment, or camp site you can find. Good thing you’ve got plenty of options—maybe too many. Travelers looking for the best vacation rental sites must weed through big online travel agencies, small niche sites, and a slew of blogs giving you advice. The process can be overwhelming.
Many people are not even aware that most of the vacation rental websites are owned by a handful of large companies; you could find yourself wasting time searching the same inventory on multiple travel rental sites.
Many travelers don’t realize that some of the best vacation rental sites like Travelocity, Orbitz, and CheapTickets are all owned by Expedia Group, and typically have very similar inventory, pricing, and filter options. The Expedia sites offer every possible vacation package combination you can imagine and will even search for vacation rental properties. With that being said, it doesn’t mean you will always find the best deal. So we compiled a list of what we here at NoShoesTraveler believe to be the 10 Best Vacation Rental Sites for Travelers.
The 10 Best Vacation Rental Sites
Airbnb
The name of this site is almost synonymous with short-term rentals these days, and its reputation as one of the best vacation rental sites is well deserved. Airbnb offers lots of listings in some of the most popular travel destinations, and its site is easy to use. In fact we even booked a beach front apartment in Normandie France with Airbnb. You can quickly browse by location, using the map to browse the area you desire. The main page offers useful information right off the bat, including the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, traveler rating, price, guest capacity, key amenities, and type of place you would like such as entire place, private room, or hotel room. You can also scroll through photos.
What we like best: The site makes it easier to sort through hundreds of properties by identifying Superhosts (highly rated hosts who are committed to providing great stays) and Airbnb Plus listings (“a selection of places to stay verified for quality and design”). Because standards can vary so widely from one vacation rental to another, choosing properties with one or both of these designations can help. We normally read the reviews and focus on the most recent reviews and realistic reviews.
NoShoesraveler hint: Airbnb also offers unique camping stays in barns, campers, dome houses, earth houses, tents, trains and yurts.
Vrbo
Acquired by Expedia Group in 2015 and then merged with its sister site HomeAway, Vrbo (vacation rentals by owner) offers the best features out of both sites. You can browse by property type, from condos to cabins, through their catalogue of over 2 million vacation rentals. If you have an idea of the type of trip you’d like to take but aren’t attached to a destination, you can check out their curated list of properties by vacation type and nearby activities.
The search results display the top amenities for each property along with both the nightly price and total price of the stay for the selected dates. Click into a result to see an in-depth and easy to understand description of policies and amenities, along with star ratings and traveler reviews.
Best Feature: Vrbo highlights Premier Partners that offer great guest service.
TurnKey
TurnKey may not be a household name like Airbnb, but it’s certainly no stranger to the world of vacation rentals. It is the 2020 Travel Weekly Magellan Gold Award Winner for Hospitality in the Overall Vacation rentals/Villas/Time Share category. Searching for your dream vacation home is easy. You can browse the site by popular destinations or scroll through their convenient listing of properties by state. You can centralize your stay through their Guest Portal. One nice thing about Turnkey is their properties are protected by digital locks, with each customer receiving a custom key code at the time of booking, eliminating the need for tedious key exchanges and reducing in-person contact.
TurnKey offers 24/7 live guest support. Each rental features complimentary wi-fi and fully equipped kitchens, making these properties a great option for families or travelers who plan to save a little money on eating out.
Best Feature: With TurnKey, you always deal with a local TurnKey team rather than individual homeowners, guaranteeing a more consistent quality of service across stays.
Homes & Villas by Marriott
If you want the quality and peace of mind you get from a big hotel brand without the hotel feel, then Marriott Homes & Villas may be the right site for you. All accommodations come with 24/7 guest support, kitchen essentials, in-unit washer, bathroom amenities such as shampoo and soap, wi-fi, linens and towels.
The site has the same easy user interface you expect from Marriott. The search function allows you to filter by destination, with travel dates being optional criteria to narrow the search. This is great for those early in their trip planning process or travelers who like to let deals dictate their itinerary. Maybe you’re just looking for a weekend getaway. With Marriott, they offer an easy “near me” option to see what’s available in your area. Properties on this site have large galleries of photos to peruse
Best Feature: Marriott Homes & Villas ties into the larger Marriott rewards program. You can earn points when you book or redeem existing points on a vacation rental.
Getaway
If you’re looking for something different and want to try cabin camping, look no further than Getaway. Getaway began operating in 2015, was featured on Shark Tank, and has over 100 cabins across the United States. They make it their mission to “give people time, space, and permission to be off.” Their tiny cabins in nature provide a break from the city, technology, and work, so that you can recharge and reconnect to who and what matters most. Getaway has fourteen Outpost locations, most of them along the East Coast with a few near the Gulf of Mexico and two on the West Coast. These are not your Grandpa kind of cabins, let me assure you. They like to refer to them as a Getaway house as it is really more of a tiny house than a cabin, with huge windows that face out into the woods to make you feel like you’re almost sleeping outside. 140-200 Square feet accommodate two to four guests. The mini-kitchens at these properties provide only the bare necessities, but you can supplement your supply by opting for a $30 Sustenance Box, which includes some nonperishable meal and snack options. Each cabin also comes with a firepit, grill grate, and picnic table. They are normally within a 2 hour drive of a major city. NO WIFI and most are in areas with spotty cell service.
Best Feature: If you’re looking for the feeling of an off-the-grid escape but aren’t truly ready to pitch a tent in the middle of the wilderness, this is the right rental experience for you
HometoGo
The prime advantage of HometoGo is that it’s a meta-search site, which means that you can search many of the best vacation rental sites (including most of the others on this list) with one click. Persistent pop-ups and offers to sign you in with Google or Facebook are annoying, but once you’ve cleared them away you can view tons of properties from Airbnb, Hotels.com, or Vrbo). One great feature they offer is a price filter to show you either the nightly rate or the total cost of your stay. This way you can then adjust your price range accordingly.
Like with other meta data sites, we suggest you use this as a starting point. It can get a little annoying when you click over to a deal and are not taken directly to the property but rather to a list of other rentals in your destination. Unfortunately, we are all too familiar with this from other meta-search sites. Then to find out a given deal simply isn’t available anymore or to discover that the price on HometoGo didn’t match what was advertised on the original listing site can be very frustrating.
Best feature: Despite the occasional pricing glitches, this site is the closest thing the vacation rental industry has to a one-stop shop, as it lists inventory from hundreds of other short-term rental websites.
NoShoesTraveler hint: Use HometoGo as a search engine, then do your booking on the actual vacation rental site itself.
Booking.com
Booking.com lists just about every type of accommodation imaginable, from hotels and B&Bs to vacation rentals and apartments. This is a perk for travelers open to a variety of lodging options, while those who know they want a vacation rental will have to take the extra step of filtering out extraneous search results.
Expedia
Like Booking.com, Expedia offers a variety of accommodation types, but it has a dedicated vacation rental search page so you can skip the filtering step. The site offers a good selection of results, and shouldn’t be ignored as some people will now list a home directly through Expedia and never use Airbnb or VRBO. You can find a some great places for Disney World or Disney Land using Expedia.
Tripadvisor
With Tripadvisor best known for hotel reviews, it now also provides vacation rentals thanks to its acquisitions of FlipKey and HolidayLettings. (The sites share inventory, so searching Tripadvisor will turn up properties from the other two sites). There are plenty of listings, which you can filter by price, number of bedrooms/bathrooms, distance, and so on. The site has a mix of properties, some of which can be paid for online and others that require direct arrangements with the owner.
It seems Tripadvisor is a mishmash of listings. Quality and details can vary from listing to listing. The traveler reviews are extremely helpful and I like to search for key words such as snorkeling or swimming pool to see what other guests have written. There is an option to send a message to the owner through the site which can also be helpful.
Best feature: The price on the listing results page is the final price you’ll pay, including taxes and fees—rather than the base rate, which is what most vacation rental sites list. Tripadvisor also lists both the nightly rate and the total cost. If paying by credit card through Trip Advisor, you get
Hipcamp
Camping has always been a popular American pastime, in part because it is relatively affordable, but it has seen a surge in popularity in the past few years. If you have ever tried to book a camp site at a popular National Park on a holiday weekend, you know it’s frustrating, if not near impossible. Hipcamp was born out of this frustration with conventional camping reservation systems, make camping more accessible by streamlining the campground search and evaluation process, simplifying booking as best they can. You can search by state, city, or Zip code, scroll through captivating photos, and filter by amenities and activities, including stargazing and swimming holes.
The real secret to Hipcamp’s success is partnerships with landowners, many of whom are small farmers or ranchers, creating entirely new camping destinations that have never existed before. With the private sites and national, state and regional parks, Hipcamp offers over 387,000 campsites, making it hard to beat if you’re searching for a campsite. Some state and federal campgrounds aren’t bookable on Hipcamp but you can still search for them. This is a great opportunity if you want to keep costs down on that family road trip or travel by RV.
Best feature: Hipcamp has created a community of campers who share reviews and advice. Being called the Airbnb of camping, the experience is smooth and user-friendly, even if you’re a novice camper.
