Today, we’re very happy to announce the immediate availability of Insider Guides. Launched in partnership with Gogobot, this new, free product enables vacation rental owners and managers to create custom online guides that enable authentic, local experiences for travelers.

Most of us are familiar with the binder of “things to do, nearby restaurants, and helpful information” found in almost every vacation rental in the world.  Because owners and managers are familiar with the property and the area, they can save travelers time, point them at the best restaurants, and highlight hard to find “off-the-beaten-path” experiences that really make a vacation rental stay special.

However, the binder approach does have a few drawbacks. They take a lot of work to assemble, usually involving printouts, or menus, or handwritten notes and maps. They are hard to keep up-to-date as new restaurants and attractions open (or close).  Your guests can’t see it before they arrive or access it on a smartphone because the guides are not online.

Insider Guides make it easy to build a visually compelling, online guide that is rich with information (like addresses and locations) and enhanced with reviews submitted by one of the most passionate travel communities on the planet:  the 2.5 million-strong Gogobot community.

What is an Insider Guide? 

There are two key elements to an Insider Guide: The first is a list of points of interest (POI) on your VRBO.com or HomeAway.com listing. These POIs have thumbnail photos, distance to your property, and your star ratings and reviews. All POIs are displayed on your map creating a quick and easy way for you to market your property and the activities, attractions, and restaurants around it. This is designed to entice travelers with exciting and fun attractions and search engines with SEO-friendly reviews. See the screenshot below to see how POIs appear on your listing or visit a listing on VRBO.com or HomeAway.com.

The second is the Insider Guide itself. On this page, there is more information about each place (the address, for example), larger photos, and more interactive and social features. This guide is designed for the traveler to use when planning their stay or while they are on vacation.

Travelers can view the Insider Guide on a mobile device, tablet or PC, or download it into the Gogobot iOS™ or Android™ smartphone app. There are map views, a print view (very handy for your binder!), and options for travelers to create their own trip plan or share it with friends or fellow travelers.

The screenshots below show the various views of the Insider Guide or see an example of one here <link>

List View:

Map View:

Mobile Version:

Creating a Guide

Creating a guide is simple. As an owner or a manager, you simply head to the listing editor in your dashboard to get started.

Dashboard View:

Once you’ve named your guide and uploaded a photo, you can quickly add places from Gogobot’s extensive database, write your own review, provide your own ratings, or upload photos.  Only your ratings and reviews will show up on your listing - so make sure you take the time to add your personal and local knowledge. Gogobot built this part of the product, and it’s really slick because they provide you with suggestions that can really get your creative juices going.

Since there is no one who knows your property quite as well as you do - each guide is as unique and special as you make it. Some owners and managers will curate a list of popular attractions, while others will add “off the beaten path” attractions like the blueberry patch, flea market, coffee shop, or hike. These unique and special attractions are what unlock the deep local knowledge that will make for truly delightful and relevant experiences - which in turn will result in great reviews, happy travelers, and more bookings.

How can you take advantage of an Insider Guide?

Once you’ve created your guide, it’s up to you to determine when to share it with your guests.  Some of you will include it in all of your communications from your first inquiry response onward. Others will want to provide the link to travelers only after booking. We’ve provided a helpful “shortcut link” to make it easy to embed the link into your inquiry or ReservationManager™ response templates or any email you send to your guests.

Not only does an Insider Guide allow you to market your property, but it also reduces the time you have to spend answering those frequent questions guests always ask: where is the nearest grocery store? What activities do you recommend? What are the best restaurants? With an Insider Guide, the answer is simple: check the link!

How do I get started?

You can get started building your guide right now. Many owners and managers have already started (see below for some examples) so don’t delay.  Here are a few tips: Make sure you add reviews and ratings! Use the photos that Gogobot provides, or add your own for that personal touch. Send it to your friends who live in the area to get them to comment. And best of all, since you have a VRBO.com or HomeAway.com listing, Insider Guides are included free of charge.  

Here are some resources to help you create a great Insider Guide:

http://help.homeaway.com/articles/en_US/Solution/Insiders-Guide-FAQs?knowledgeHome

And here are some examples to inspire you:

• Sonoma, Calif.
• Austin, Texas
• Umbria, Italy

Enjoy creating your Insider Guide, and make sure you send us your thoughts and feedback!

 
Tom Hale

Chief Product Officer

The phishing storm is brewing

The vacation rental industry gathered in Austin, Texas last weekend for the HomeAway Summit. Owners, Property Managers, HomeAway staff, and HomeAway partners discussed the state of the vacation rental industry, saw old friends and made new ones, and compared notes.

But this year, a new word entered the conversations in the halls, over drinks, and in the content of the Summit: phishing.  Phishing, loosely defined, is the attempt by criminals to steal your online identity, most frequently via accessing your email account. While our industry continues to thrive, the threat of hackers gaining access to owners’ or property managers’ email accounts continues. If we do not pull together to fight this threat, it will affect the way travelers feel about the vacation rental industry, and ultimately, about booking your property. A storm is brewing.

For some, the storm has already come – just ask anyone who has had their email password phished. Scammers have intercepted inquiries, and ruined vacations by stealing money from trusting vacation rental travelers.  Owners and property managers have had to scramble to re-secure their email accounts and protect their reputations. And the reputation of the vacation rental industry is in question.

For most, the HomeAway Summit marked the first time that they ever heard of phishing, but they understood how both owners and travelers are at risk because of our industry’s reliance on trusted communications via email. (If you are not familiar with phishing, click here for an overview of how it happens, or read Carl Shepherd’s post on phishing.

Today, losses due to phishing are small: in Q1 2012, phishing scams affected less than 0.1% of travelers who found a vacation rental via a HomeAway website. 

But even one ruined vacation or theft of an owner or property manager’s identity is totally unacceptable. Everyone in the vacation rental industry – from owners to property managers to HomeAway – has a role to play in stopping phishing scams.  While phishing may be a relatively small problem in absolute numbers, recent activity tells us that the phishers are getting smarter and more travelers, owners, and managers are being affected.  It is clear that scammers and criminals have figured out that the vacation rental industry is a great target.

Why? Because:

• the standard practice in the vacation rental industry is for travelers to pay large amounts of money for vacation rentals, long before the stay and sight unseen;
• not everyone understands or uses safe and secure payment methods;
• many people conduct their business in email accounts from email providers that have been repeatedly compromised; and
• cybercriminals are good at exploiting communities that rely on trust and a personal connection.

Phishing is not new; vacation rentals are not the first industry to be targeted by cybercriminals. Phishers have attacked many online industries ranging from online auctions, banking, social media, travel, e-commerce, even medical and government institutions, impacting major brands like eBay, PayPal, Barclays, Wells Fargo, Chase, and Bank of America.

Everyone of us in the vacation rental industry has a lot at stake, and we will all need to work together to stop phishers.  You can do your part by guarding your email password with the same care as you protect your social security number, your bank account, and your most valuable possessions.

Our vision on how to fight phishing

So what can HomeAway do to fight phishing?  To be clear, we’ve been fighting scammers ever since HomeAway was founded.  But as we look ahead, we have come to the conclusion that HomeAway needs to take a strong stance against phishing.

We believe that we can fight phishing by:

• safeguarding the traveler’s money by providing safe payment methods protected by strong security, such as ReservationManager™;
• protecting owner and traveler email addresses so that phishers cannot readily target those accounts;
• continuing to provide secure authentication so that HomeAway can ensure that only legitimate owners, travelers, and managers can access information; and most critically
• moving interactions between owners or managers and travelers into a secure environment where everyone can be confident they are talking to each other, not a crook.

Our vision is that we can create an environment where we can protect owners, property managers and travelers with something we are calling “HomeAway Secure Communication.”  This would be a new system, envisioned only in the last few months, and which is now in development. We plan to make it available starting in the second half of this year.

This proposed system is similar to sites you may use, like Facebook, LinkedIn and others, where authentication is required by both parties before they can connect. On these sites, once two parties have decided to “trust” each other, they can converse via email. But until trust is established, they CAN still communicate keeping key elements of their identity protected.

In our vision, owners and travelers would still receive notifications and messages from each other via email and text message, but they need to reply via a secure system that does not disclose their email address.  This way, HomeAway would be able to ensure the legitimacy of the owner or property manager and the traveler.

We’ve already started: we showed one early prototype of HomeAway Secure Communication at the Summit during the HomeAway Sneak Peeks session. We demonstrated how the system will enable owners and property managers to:

• communicate safely with travelers and only reveal their email address when they choose to;
• have a persistent record of the conversation, payments and other events that have occurred;
• manage their conversations, bookings and payments via mobile app; and
• reduce manual and repetitive work for responding to inquiries, sending information about properties and managing bookings and payment.

We recognize that many of our customers rely heavily on email to manage their interactions with travelers. We also know that a system like this will represent a significant change for many owners and managers.

But it is precisely because your email account is so critical to your business that it must be protected.

We are highly sensitive to the needs of our customers and are aware of the scope of change that this solution represents. We are also laser-focused on making this solution as convenient and beneficial as possible; but we are counting on you, our customers – property managers and owners – to help us design and implement a solution that improves the efficiency and effectiveness of responding to inquiries and managing communications with your customers – the travelers.

We’re doing something different than what we normally do. We are announcing our intentions and inviting our community and customers to participate in the process of creating a solution because we believe it is critical to your future success as an owner or property manager: if travelers don’t trust, they will not rent. 

And if you have ideas, you can give us your feedback directly by emailing us at secure-feedback@homeaway.com or via the feedback links on all of our sites. While we don’t respond to every email we get, we do READ every one. 

If you want to learn more about our vision for HomeAway Secure Communication, check our FAQ here.

And please sign up for the Secure Communication group on Community from HomeAway  to join the discussion – we’ll post updates there as we go forward.

What can I do now to fight phishing?

We all have to pull together to fight phishing. HomeAway has worked hard to educate the industry via emails, messages on our website, and via the Security Center. We continuously invest in technology to actively monitor fraud, to surface suspicious activity, and to harden our systems and protect our customers. More recently, we have introduced new products, such as ReservationManager and Traveler Profiles, and processes such as Phone Verification to support safety.

Here are a few steps you can take now to join in the fight:

1. Educate yourself – visit our Security Center to learn about phishing
2. Read our FAQ to learn how to spot fraudulent inquiries
3. When you receive a suspicious inquiry or email, please let us know
4. Accept safe payment methods like those offered through ReservationManager
5. Include an up-to-date phone number on your listing. We recommend that travelers call the telephone number published on your property listing page to confirm their reservation and payment details
6. Use two-factor authentication on your email accounts. See this article on how. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/04/make-your-email-hacker-proof.html
7. If you list on vrbo.com or homeaway.com - log into your dashboard to check your inquiries to make sure you (and not a phisher) are receiving your inquiries.
   Never enter your email password on any webpage via a link sent to you by email, or even if a login page that looks like your email provider’s website pops up unexpectedly.  Always go to the email provider’s website to log in
8. And don’t ignore warning signs or red flags - if you have a bad feeling, it never hurts to double check

Together we can fight this threat to the vacation rental industry, and we’re counting on you, just like you count on us.

Sincerely,

Tom Hale

Chief Product Officer