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HomeAway

Vacation rentals make hotels more like home

Christopher Elliott
Special for USA TODAY
A room at Homewood Suites by Hilton offers guests the comforts of home while on the road.

Want a hotel that feels like home? So did Kristin Stallings when she recently looked for accommodations in Florida to celebrate her wedding anniversary.

A small, pricey room, where everything felt "smashed together," wasn't at the top of her list, says Stallings, a loan risk analyst from Houston.

"I remembered how much I dislike middle-of-the-night door slamming, loud hallway discussions and noisy neighbors," she adds. "More than once I've had to request a new room due to noise."

Raise your hand if you know how this one ends. If you guessed that Stallings skipped a hotel and rented a home instead, bonus points.

True, more people than ever are choosing vacation rentals over hotels. But hotels aren't taking this lying down. They're adding amenities to make their accommodations more home-like while retaining some of the best features of a hotel, like security and a consistent product. Result: As competition heats up, modern hotels have become roomier and more amenity-rich than ever. They've become, for lack of a better term, vacation-rentalized.

To understand what happened, rewind to the launch of HomeAway.com. It's the dominant vacation rental website, and it's celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. The site gave the vacation rental market the legitimacy and visibility it long sought. But, more importantly, its clever marketing made consumers like Stallings aware that they had more options.

By 2009, HomeAway had almost half-a-million active listings, according to Revaluate, a market research firm. Today, HomeAway and Airbnb have roughly 1 million active listings each and annual revenues nearing half-a-billion dollars, some of which has come at the expense of the traditional hotel industry.

"All of the recent research seems to agree that hotels' profitability has been negatively impacted by the growth of short-term rentals," says Max Galka, Revaluate's CEO.

The upshot? As their profits stalled, hotels reacted by making their accommodations more home-like. For example, the Four Seasons Hotel Houston recently added 64 residences with full kitchens, a dining area and living space separated from the bedroom area to its hotel inventory. Fifty NYC, in midtown Manhattan, just spent $19 million on a renovation meant to attract more long-term customers by adding kitchenettes with stove tops, toasters, microwaves, sinks and refrigerators.

And don't forget the fast-growing all-suites properties, like Marriott's SpringHill and TownePlace. Or upscale hotel brands such as Montage Hotels & Resorts, which just opened its first Hawaii property, Montage Kapalua Bay. That property features one-, two-, three- and four-bedroom residential-style suites that include full kitchens, washers and dryers, and serious entertainment centers.

"A lot of hotels now include a kitchen corner or even a fully-equipped kitchen in suites," says Olivier Olielo, who runs a luxury hotel website. "This usually includes a large fridge, a sink and a microwave."

Point being, hotels are competing with home rentals like never before and that's great for everyone. You can often book a bigger, better hotel room at the same rate as the old, closet-sized, amenity-starved accommodations pre-HomeAway.com. (Though not always; rates at the upscale Montage start at $695 a night).

Of course, vacation rentals are responding in kind. HomeAway just integrated Uber, Instacart and Gogobot into its app, helping travelers staying in its vacation rentals easily find a ride, stock up on groceries and choose restaurants. You know, just like a hotel's concierge service.

Where's all this headed? With more kinds of accommodations available in North America than perhaps at any other time in the history of the modern hotel industry, you don't have to settle for the same-old. With a little shopping, you can find a place that feels like home and costs about the same as a traditional room. And sometimes, you can have it all — the security of a hotel and the spaciousness of your own living room.

In the end, Stallings booked a renovated 1940s cottage in Cocoa Beach, Fla. It came with two bedrooms and lots of extras, like beach gear, snorkel equipment, board games and updated libraries for beach reading. Plus, it cost about the same as a hotel that was only a fraction of the size.

"The owners provided maps and restaurant recommendations, the house was clean, and we felt very comfortable there," she says. "Our vacation was perfect."

How to find accommodations that are just like home

• Know where to find the rentals online. Sites like HomeAway.com, FlipKey.com and Airbnb.com can offer a range of rental accommodations. All are worth bookmarking if you're looking for a home-like experience.

Look offline, too. Travel agents, newspaper classified ads section and yes, even an in-person inquiry in a resort area can turn up a deal on a vacation rental. Hint: Those throwaway weekly newspapers circulating at your favorite vacation destination sometimes have some pretty good deals.

Don't skip a hotel. Conventional hotels may offer a competitive product with more room and services that no rental has (like room service or dry cleaning) at a comparable price. Cast a wide net between an all-suites hotel like Candlewood Suites and an extended-stay property like Homewood Suites by Hilton.

Christopher Elliott is a consumer advocate and editor at large for National Geographic Traveler. Contact him at chris@elliott.org or visit elliott.org.

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