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Search - Thursday, August 2, 2007

Compete.com Execs Set To Launch Vacation Rental Site Flipkey

As we have noted in the past the vacation rental market has been consolidating with some high prices being paid for popular sites like VRBO.com. While the current generation of vacation rental sites are helpful, they have primitive functionality so we have felt the market is ripe for some tech smart new-comers to take the market by storm. Compete.com founders TJ Mahony and Carl Query want to do just that with their pre-launch startup Flipkey. The company plans to launch in the fall. FlipKey says it wants to help expand the vacation rental market by "providing a platform to highlight professional reputation and trust. There are 6.5M vacation homes in the US and less than 10% are rented to travelers looking for a great place to stay." In other words, the company wants to turn hotel vacationers into vacation home renters.

As it happens, we were just talking with a buddy who rented a place in Napa for 2 months having found it on the Internet. He said he had a knot in his stomach not knowing what kind of shape to find the place in. Staying in a hotel is much less of a gamble. Flipkey wants to add a layer of data to tell you if the home renters are slobs or if they have their act together. It will be interesting to see how they collect that data.

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On a related note, the Flipkey blog turned us on to a couple of other interesting vacation home sites. Rentalo wants to do for vacation rentals what LendingTree has done for mortgages - have vacation home owners bid on the renter's business.

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