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eCommerce - Tuesday, November 13, 2007

PickPackGo Goes For The Jugular With King VRBO

Ask anyone to tell you were to land a vacation rental home and 9 times out of ten they will tell you to go VRBO. The site is the Craig's List of the vacation rental market. It's bare bones, it hasn't changed in years and nothing touches its inventory of homes.

PickPackGo gets in touch again, this time to let us know that PickPackGo has won the Interactive Media Awards' Outstanding Achievement Award under the 'Travel/Tourism' category.

As it happens, we have been booking trips to Hawaii and Tahoe and have spent umpteen hours on VRBO. Indeed, the site has an amazing number of listings, its easy to navigate, and there are no glaring shortcomings.

The weakness that PickPackGo spots is that VRBO looks so 2001. PickPackGo, in contrast, has AJAX and a number of other modern touches. Moreover, PickPackGo, is aiming to develop what VRBO lacks - community and reviews of homes.

Our biggest beef with VRBO and where we think a business like PickPackGo has leverage is that when you once you have to do research off the site at places like Tripadvisor to find out which resorts rock and which units have the best location, then return to VRBO to book. That makes no sense.

Tonight, having spent some more timing looking for a place on PickPackGo, we ended up booking through VRBO. Selection trumped site attractiveness but we can imagine next year at this time that PickPackGo might earn our business.

As background, PickPackGo was founded by Felix Lin who had founded include AvantGo, a mobile data startup that was acquired by Sybase, as well as Qurb, the anti-spam software company acquired by CA.

View - PickPackGo site