Read this if you have booked a vacation rental with Vacasa or plan to. The company also warned of “significant uncertainty” in the future.
Read this if you have booked a vacation rental with Vacasa or plan to. The company also warned of “significant uncertainty” in the future.
Thank you for bringing this up. I was looking at renting through Vacasa for Molokai. I only used AirBnB once and mostly VRBO as I had positive experience with them. Will most likely continue to use VRBO or hotels
Question please.. . It sounds like Vacasa only rent homes. If this is the case than wouldn’t the general objection to rentals in residential neighborhoods been a bad choice of product? Neighbors are objecting to vacation rentals in residential neighborhoods.
Mahalo
Hi Robin.
Vacasa, like Airbnb and VRBO, rent vacation homes, which means condos and houses. The listings on these sites will have appropriate vacation rental status, and a rental permit number will be reflected on each rental.
Aloha.
Aloha.
I believe VRBO not AirBnb is the gold standard for Hawaii vacation rentals. My wife and my experience has been much better with VRBO properties than those from the AirBnb platform, especially if they are owner managed with mostly 5 star reviews. They are almost always more nicely furnished, cleaner, have more amenities and just more upscale.
Gold standard? Many owners post their property on both platforms— VRBO and AIrBNB. The difference may be the service you receive from either should you need it.
We just returned from Kauai rented a 3 bedroom 3 bath condo through Vacasa, the condo was in top condition, instructions for check in were easy to follow, I texted back and forth with Vacasa during our stay, always received a prompt response, overall they were great to work with,
Thank you for the recent positive feedback, Beau. I have a condo in Princeville rented through Vacasa in October I was worried about. Stayed there twice before, but was managed by a different company until last year.
That’s what happens when a company’s main focus is squeezing as much profit
as possible via the use of dynamic pricing and not taking care of it’s customers.
As a former software engineer with deep knowledge of their practices. Run! I encourage any owner to evaluate Where the fees start and end. You are paying %35 of your booking to them. This is in addition to the roughly 15% of other fees. 50% of the booking goes to Vacasa.
Is there a discount, booking charge, employee free stay, etc? You as the property owner will be stiffed for that. Literally, I used “Vacasa Employee Credits” to stay free in houses. Guess who paid for the cleaning? The owner might notice extra cleaning charges. Always at the expense of the owner.
Well, except for the founder. He would make Vacasa cleaners perform cleans on his house at Vacasa’s expense. He also personally kept all fees when his homes rented. Plus cleans.
Dynamic pricing is heinous!!! Unless you can book super early the companies – air, hotels, STRs – are going to make you pay through the nose. This practice is nothing but extreme greed.
Perhaps they should have listened to all the local teams that tried to tell them how it should be. But no they were far to arrogant as techies to listen to boots on the ground. Treat your employees like s*** and see where that gets you, dirty condos and poor service from a skeleton crew y’all.
This was a disaster from the start. They took away our ability to show aloha and replaced it with a “less contact with the guest the better”. Good riddance.
Aloha Tammy. It sounds like you are a former Vacasa employee? You should please include that in your review as full disclosure.
On another note, I see that AirBNB also did a layoff recently. Perhaps all these platforms are doing some housekeeping.
Sorry to hear this as we have a vacation rental on Kauai, but feel like we dodged a bullet when our management company was bought out by Vacasa and we decided to go a different route and stay with a local management company. This was in 2021 and reading reviews even back then were not glowing at all. Lots and lots of complaints about cleanliness of units and nickel and diming owners. Hoping visitors with reservations are fulfilled.
Owners are leaving the Vacasa – wonder where they’re going. Would be great if local companies could acquire the business.
Beat of Hawaii: I really enjoy getting your emails as I always learn something new.
Thank you for today’s information regarding Vacasa. I am wondering what I do about our reservation for October of this year. I immediately looked up our reservation we made in January of this year. It has the Airbnb logo and says Airbnb, but under the “About your host” it says Vacasa Vacation Home Management.
We gave them $1,000 in January and another $4,000 will be scheduled for payment on September 18, 2023. The paperwork states that we have until September 26th to cancel for free. I am thinking I will get a hold of Airbnb support to see what they have to say.
Any other thoughts, comments or suggestions?
Thank you!
Hi Kathy.
Thanks for the comment. Great question. Yes do check with Airbnb and perhaps inquire about their protection since you’re paying them the money and it seems like the contract is between you and Airbnb. Indeed it seems confusing.
Please let us know.
Aloha.
So VRBO and Airbnb are booking platforms, all the management companies market the properties on Airbnb, Airbnb doesn’t own or manage Any properties. All local companies and mainland based companies who manage Hawaii rentals put properties there to get visibility and bookings. Then the company manages the booking, not the booking site! Vacasa hosting properties on Airbnb is completely normal and to be 100% expected, nothing suspicious there at all, especially when Vacasa is a premier host as listed on their site.
BOH, thank you for yet another interesting article. Yesterday, I never got around to commenting that lots of the comments posted seem so rude. No please, no thank you and full of criticism. While you have advertisements on your site, I often feel like you are reporting out of the goodness of your hearts. I appreciate all the news and your perspective.
Now for today’s article… I belong to a Facebook owners’ group and it’s often discussed how awful avacado and Evolve are at taking care of properties and guests. Steer clear, for sure.
From the group, it seems we all prefer VRBO over AIRBB. On Maui, AIRBB guests have all been strangely troublesome for one reason or another. I much prefer renting via VRBO.
Hi Lanell.
Thanks for the nice words and nearly 100 comments to date. That’s interesting about Airbnb vs. VRBO! While it started with VRBO (and we’ve used them for years), Airbnb now nearly 4 times more listings.
Aloha.
I’m a remote managing super host in CA and list on Airbnb and VRBO. Our condo is in a luxury resort on the Big Island in Waikoloa Beach Resort (our average nightly rate is $550). I knew before we purchased the only way we could afford it was to remote manage and hire a local host who does turnover for us. They coordinate the cleaning crew and conduct oversight of cleanings and vendors as well as supplies, staging and design updates. Local independent people that charge less than the 25-35% that the bigger full service property managers charge. It allows me more flexibility to charge less to my guests on the nightly rate. Look for hosts like that. We provide the best bang for your buck.