Before home-sharing platforms popularized short-term renting people looking to escape their everyday homes for a holiday would look to vacation rentals as an inexpensive alternative to a hotel. By the 1950s, renting a vacation home was a customary tradition for many, with advertisements and listings for short vacation rentals beginning to appear in newspapers. They were generally marketed and very likely managed by a local Realtor agency.
​
The first online platform to enable vacation or short-term rental bookings was VRBO (Vacation Rentals by Owner) which launched in 1995. VRBO’s website allowed users to browse and book various vacation rental properties that were managed by their individual owners, with most of the website’s listings and bookings in the United States. The mid-2000s also brought the launch of HomeAway, a merger of five different rental sites, which later acquired VRBO in 2006. Almost ten years later in 2015, Expedia purchased Homeaway to overtake Booking.com and become the world’s largest lodging seller in terms of hotels.
As online lodging companies continued to grow, Airbnb came onto the scene as a small San Francisco startup in 2008. Airbnb was the first company to allow guests to book a single room in a host’s home and pay using a credit card over the internet. Over the years, Airbnb has grown exponentially, going from 10,000 users and 2,500 listings in March of 2009 to the current estimates of around 150 million users and over 6 million listings around the world.
To help meet the rising standards of the growing customer base and improve the quality of its stays for guests of individually owned vacation rental homeowners in the South Orange County beach communities, Vacation Concierge, Inc. onboarded its first vacation rental home in the fall of 2007.
Vacation Concierge has grown with and utilizes all the above-mentioned platforms to market their family of vacation rental homes. We remain a boutique sized hospitality and management company focused solely on managing vacation rental homes servicing both our guests and our owners.
We proudly represent over 22 vacation rental properties but over the years Vacation Concierge has had the privilege to manage over 80 other vacation rental homes in California including Lake Arrowhead, Palms Springs, Palm Desert, Sedona Arizona, and the greater Knoxville area in Tennessee.