The Association of Scotland’s Self Caterers (ASSC) has launched a well-designed website, Embrace Scotland, to link travellers with more than 2,500 vacation rental properties. You can search by region, number of people, property type (apartment, lodge, cottage and so on) and star rating (currently assigned by VisitScotland). Check boxes allow you to specify that you’re […]

The vacation home rental industry must be coming of age: it’s poised to get its own reality show. PineRidge Film and Television (producers of Samantha Brown’s show “Passport to Europe,” among other programs) and Discover Vacation Homes have created a promo video for a proposed new show, “Living Large on Vacation.” According to Discover Vacation Homes […]

If you’ve rented a self-catering holiday home before, you may realize that not all villas are right for all travelling parties. Some homes simply aren’t large enough to accommodate groups of a dozen or more. In other cases, you want a bit more privacy than one home can provide. Perhaps you’d like to separate the […]

Tourism market research company PhoCusWright has released some preliminary figures from its forthcoming report, Vacation Rental Marketplace: Poised for Change. According to the study, vacation rentals are a US$24.3-billion industry worldwide, with online rentals accounting for about 12 percent of those revenues. Given the plethora of online vacation rental sites, I’m surprised the figure for […]

Not surprisingly, given that it’s one of the America’s top tourist destinations–it drew 48.7 million visitors last year, including almost 800,000 Canadians–Orlando has thousands of vacation homes for rent. Vacation homes are a great option for two types of groups that flock to Orlando each year: families visiting the famous theme parks, and golfing buddies […]

A new site, www.VacationRoost.com, targets travellers who are interested in making the jump from hotel rooms to vacation rentals but uncomfortable with the idea of renting someone’s actual home. The site’s 100,000 properties in the U.S., Canada and the Caribbean include lots of purpose-built vacation condos in beach, ski and outdoorsy locations. The site emphasizes […]

Roomorama.com, the new peer-to-peer vacation rental and room sharing service, has expanded beyond New York City to Boston, Chicago and Toronto. Listings in my old hometown of Toronto are a bit meagre at the moment, with just 24 properties. As always with any rental or home-sharing site, it pays to ask lots of questions of the […]

Looking for a studio in Midtown or a temporary pied-a-terre in the West Village? Try Roomorama.com, a new peer-to-peer service that helps travellers find short-term apartment rentals and spare rooms in New York City. Properties include a Williamsburg house owned by an actor who appeared in “The Departed,” complete with its own Zen garden, for […]

Looking for a unique place to stay in Paris, and money is no object? For rates starting at a cool 430 euro (approximately $700 Canadian or U.S.) per night, you can hole up in a 1,050-square-foot houseboat in St. Germain, complete with grand piano. Like many houseboats, it will wobble a bit if a larger boat goes […]

The concept of vacation home rentals got a shot of publicity earlier this month from Barack Obama (perhaps you’ve heard of him?). The presumptive nominee rented an $8-million home in the Honolulu suburb of Kailua for a family holiday. Hey, when you don’t own a ranch in Texas or a seaside compound in New England, […]