VACATION RENTAL PROGRAMS the biggest names vs vacation rentals by woodloch

When Airbnb first hit the scene in 2008, the idea exploded. How many empty houses or extra rooms sat in cute parts of cities across the world just waiting for someone to visit and for the owners to receive a nice little payout? It seemed novel to much of the tourism community, yet there was another that hit the scene over 10 years prior. VRBO, or Vacation Rentals by Owner, dates back to 1995, pairing homeowners with families looking to travel to various U.S. destinations. Both these companies blossomed into global initiatives, harnessing a bulletin-board-style form of online marketing to put massive audiences in front of vacation rental homeowners and taking a little cut of each sale for themselves.

Yet this concept surely isn’t a new one to the hospitality industry. You need not look further than little Pocono resorts like Woodloch to find short term, vacation rental home programs that date back even further. The Woodloch family first broke ground on Woodloch Springs in the early days of the ‘90s and was renting privately owned homes on their golf course by 1992. Looking back further than that, we can see that vacation rental home sharing boomed after the end of WWII, which paved the way for massive property management companies to aggregate and streamline the rental process by the millions.

There are an estimated 2 million professionally managed vacation rental properties across the United States, and the U.S. is only 20% of the global market. It becomes challenging as a socially-conscious person not to compare this staggering number to the 2019-estimated housing shortage of 3.8 million, a number that has only grown since the 2020 pandemic.^

This may make one scratch their head and wonder where to begin. Is a vacation rental house superior to a traditional hotel accommodation? What if you’re looking for an obscure location, or there’s an event in the area that has caused all the other options to sell out? What if you’re travelling with a large number of friends or family? Certainly, there is a way to responsibly partake in one of the most convenient and affordable vacation trends. It really becomes a question of what you’re looking for and how you feel about the social impact of the ‘little guy’s’ choices when it comes to vacation accommodation options.