HouseTrip Blog – Holiday apartment news, travel and rental tips

Renting a holiday apartment for the first time can be a fairly daunting experience. After all, it’s not like booking a hotel. You can’t just find a place and book it online. Or can you?

Holiday apartments in the past

The holiday apartments industry has been around for a very long time, but it always used to be advertised through agencies or magazines with classified listings. Information often wasn’t up to date and didn’t give enough detail. Guests contacted the owner via the agency or by phone, via the listing. Then, the internet came along. Agencies became less popular as owners realised that they could advertise their holiday apartments themselves and make more money. Websites offering classified listings took over from the magazines. And the number of websites kept growing until there were so many that it became rather difficult to choose between them.

Holiday apartments now

Nowadays, on most websites advertising holiday apartments, guests are still essentially dealing with classified ads. The owner pays the website a fee to list each of their holiday apartments for a year, and to attract traffic to it. Then the host deals with everything else: reservation, booking, payment. Guests have the choice of contacting hosts by phone or email. But information still isn’t always up to date or detailed enough. And it can be very difficult to get in touch with hosts, which is very frustrating. Since guests contact owners directly, the owners have no real reason to update their calendar, which means that many enquiries are fruitless because the holiday apartment is already booked.

Then, owners all seem to have different procedures about reservation, booking, payment, cancellation policies and so on. Just type “holiday apartments” + a city into Google and have a look at some of the listing websites. Delve deep into the fine print. There are a whole range of policies. Often guests have to pay a large percentage of the money up front, to an individual owner that they’ve never met before. This may be via Western Union, PayPal, by cheque or even by cash. The guest may need to pay in several annoying steps. And there is little protection of their money if they need to cancel or if they are unhappy when they arrive.

HouseTrip: the future of holiday apartments

HouseTrip.com offers significant benefits for inexperienced guests, solving many of these problems. Our system is very simple, but it differs from the norm. The owner does not pay a listing fee; HouseTrip just takes a commission from the bookings that we generate for owners. And we try to offer more services than just functioning as an advertising platform for holiday apartments. We offer an integrated, semi-automated messaging system; we process bookings and payments for hosts; and we offer complimentary property management software, which allows hosts to easily manage their holiday apartment. Guests can easily and quickly send multiple availability requests to multiple hosts with the messaging system. They can then book and pay directly through the website using a credit card. The payment is held securely until after the guest’s arrival, which guarantees the money if something goes wrong. And the cancellation conditions of our holiday apartments are standardised, so it’s easy to understand for both sides.

Quality Control / Customer Service

Since HouseTrip hosts do not pay a listing fee up front to advertise their properties, HouseTrip is not obliged to list any holiday apartment on the site. We are free to remove a property if the listing is not of high enough quality or if it is not managed efficiently. That means that holiday apartments on HouseTrip are consistently of a very high quality. And we take a personal interest in each and every availability request. If hosts do not reply quickly to messages, then we contact them to request that they do so. If we cannot get hold of them, we contact the guest to suggest alternative properties.

The time is now

There has never been a better time to book your first holiday apartment. The “Significantly Not As Described” phenomenon (arriving at the holiday apartment only to find that the apartment itself is nothing like the ad) which has plagued the industry for many years has been proven to be largely a myth. According to a 2008 PhoCusWright survey of over 1000 adults who had stayed in a holiday rental over the previous two years, only 1% of respondents said that they would not rent again because of a previous bad experience with a holiday rental. The same level of satisfaction would be difficult for hotels or airlines to match!

So why not give it a try? Holiday apartments have many benefits over hotels, especially if you are travelling in a group. You’re likely to get more room and more facilities for a cheaper price. HouseTrip covers many top destinations, with holiday apartments in London, holiday apartments in Paris, holiday apartments in Berlin, and so on. And you can book them easily and safely. Take a look now.