Trekadoo Partners With RentalSpot.com

[stewart christensen]

 

Trekadoo Vacation Rental Software Continues to Expand Product Offering by Partnering with RentalSpot.com

03.23.2011– Trekadoo has partnered with the free vacation rental listings search engine RentalSpot.com to provide its vacation rental software offering to RentalSpot.com’s growing community of users, vacation homeowners, and agencies.

In an announcement early this week, Trekadoo CEO Kathryn Christensen said, “We are excited about our latest partnership with RentalSpot.com. This partnership is the first in a series of partnerships that we are working on to improve the functionality and usefulness of Trekadoo.”

Trekadoo vacation rental software is designed for individual home owners allowing them to easily take online payments and run their rental properties. Partnerships, like the one with RentalSpot.com, give homeowners the ability to take bookings directly from the listing site. This functionality removes the need for home owners and renters to constantly e-mail back and forth in order to rent a property. Now vacationers looking for a property to rent on RentalSpot.com can simply book online - the same way they would book a hotel or flight.

RentalSpot.com provides free listings to homeowners and agencies while allowing users to search vacation rental properties using a highly intuitive map-based interface. In addition, community members can easily collaborate with family and friends and rate properties they have rented. Free to advertise and free to use, RentalSpot.com is a more targeted alternative to expensive vacation home rental by owner sites like HomeAway and VRBO.

“We believe incorporating Trekadoo’s web-based vacation rental management software into our web presence will give our community of vacation home owners and agencies an easy way to accept secure, online rental payments,” said RentalSpot.com’s CTO and Founding Partner Nate Yaconis. “Our Trekadoo partnership is a logical fit that will benefit our growing user base.”

In Trekadoo’s effort to continue expanding its offering to vacation home owners, Christensen added, “We are communicating with other listing services that see the need for this type of functionality in the market. Booking online is such a simple thing. It amazes me that the technology in the vacation rental industry is so far behind the rest of the travel industry. We are changing that.”

The vacation rental industry is rapidly changing, with more companies and services for vacation home owners popping up every day. While online payments are not common now, the founders of Trekadoo believe only those sites that provide this functionality will survive over the next five years. Trekadoo’s goal is to make this simple functionality commonplace in the industry.

“There are many people who don’t use vacation rentals because they’re simply not as convenient as hotels,” said Christensen. “There is a fear of the unknown, especially when it comes to dealing with individual people, mailing payments, or sharing credit card information over the phone. People are just not comfortable with that. As online booking becomes more prevalent and secure, we will see an explosion in the market. Vacation rentals will quickly become mainstream; we’re already seeing this with the explosion of airbnb.com.”

For more information on these services, visit http://www.trekadoo.com or http://rentalspot.com.