The rental down the road can now take a booking for tonight
Vrbo has turned on same-day booking and two new cancellation tiers, closing the two gaps that used to send those guests to a hotel
by Markus Busch
What shipped. Expedia listed its autumn Vrbo releases on September 1. Three of them are marked available globally. Hosts can now accept a booking inside 24 hours of check-in, switched on from the calendar settings. Two new cancellation policies sit alongside the old ones: a five-day full refund, and one that refunds in full up to the day before arrival. And a sponsored placement auction now runs at the top of Vrbo search, charged when a booking completes rather than when someone clicks.
What those two doors used to be. Ask a leisure hotelier why a guest picked the hotel over the four-bedroom villa with the better pool, and eventually you get to the same two answers. She decided on Thursday for Friday. Or she wasn't sure yet and wanted to be able to change her mind. A vacation rental could not serve either. The booking window closed days out, the deposit was gone, and the owner had a cleaner scheduled.
That was never a marketing advantage. It was a structural one, and it arrived without being sold. The late booker and the uncertain booker came to the hotel because nobody else could take them.
Both are open now. A property in your market can accept tonight's reservation, and can offer a guest a full refund up to the day before she arrives. Expedia says flexible policies drive "nearly five times as many bookings" — its own figure, from its own marketplace, and worth exactly what a marketplace's own conversion claim is worth. The direction is not in doubt even if the multiple is.
Where this actually bites. Not in a city center with corporate demand and a Tuesday-night rate. In the resort, coastal and ski markets, where the rental across the valley has always been the real comp set and the hotel's edge was flexibility rather than price. That is where the walk-in, the weather change, the extended stay and the cancelled plan have been quietly landing on the hotel side for a decade.
The auction underneath. The sponsored listings piece deserves its own note. Placement is priced on completed bookings, which means a rental host raises what the channel takes in exchange for rank — the same commission-for-position trade this publication has documented on Expedia's hotel side. It arrived in rentals fully formed, with bid modifiers and length-of-stay targeting on day one.
What has not shipped. Non-refundable rates on Vrbo listings, merchandised sale events, and Vrbo inventory inside Expedia's flight-and-hotel packages are all announced and none is live. The packages item is the one to watch, and when it lands it changes the comp set inside a channel hotels have had largely to themselves. It is not there yet, and it is excluded at launch from Canada, the UK and the EU.
The rental could not take a guest who decided on Thursday. Now it can, and it can let her change her mind on Friday.
Read also: Airbnb added your hotel to stop travelers from leaving its app
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