Joyce Copeland‘s love affair with vacation rentals started about a decade ago, when she was planning a vacation for her extended family and spotted a newspaper ad for short-term rentals in Lake Tahoe. “I was astounded by how little money we’d have to spend, and we could bring the dogs,” she says. Joyce often travels […]

Interested in renting a house or apartment for your next vacation, but nervous about dealing with total strangers in a rent-by-owner arrangement or a big agency? Don’t despair. According to a new PhoCusWright study of the vacation rental market, there are 1.26 million homes available for short-term rental in the U.S. alone and–here’s the interesting […]

I’ve been raving about the benefits of vacation rentals for years to anyone who will listen. So what’s so great about staying in a house or apartment instead of a hotel room? Here are my top five reasons to go local. You can discover new neighbourhoods. In many cities, hotels are clustered downtown or in […]

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m a huge fan of vacation home and apartment rentals. I’ve rented properties on three continents and, fortunately, have never been the victim of a scam. But fraudsters are out there, as shown by this recent CBC story about a Gatineau, Quebec, family who lost $4,000 while trying […]

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 […]

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 […]