If I was forced to make a decision to renew or let my subscription expire I will not renew next year.

Property 1 - April, 2012

Property 2 - May, 2012

Property 3 - July, 2012

For your poll:  Will not renew

Homeaway should not just dismiss the posts from owners.  The majority of owners are successful people in all walks of life.  The majority are educated.  Many I would guess are already running businesses of some kind.  We are all entrepreneurs in buying and managing vacation properties.  The subscribers for the most part will not be a "follow the herd" group.  Unless the herd is sending a message to Homeaway.  Of course, all HA would have to do is pull the plug on Community.  If you are an owner then there will need to be an alternative site to have forums if Community is put to sleep. 

I have 2 listings; both expire Jun 25, 2012.

I recently renewed my listing after having dropped HA 3 years ago for their unfair pricing model.  I came back only because I was offered a 50% discount.  Even at that rate, I had to search long and hard to decide if it would be worth it or not.  Now, with this new pricing model, I see that they suckered me into renewing just in time before they degraded the performance of basic listings by introducing this tiered system.

Will I renew again?  Certainly -- if they offer me a 75% discount to compensate for the reduced performance.

No discount?  No renewal.  I can not afford it -- HA has priced me out of their market.

P.

I resent FlipKey because in order to be on TripAdvisor you have to pay their subsidiary FlipKey to list there.  That having been said, I tried the one-month free offer and had zilch.

The new pricing is further evidence the heyday of the free-wheeling commercial internet is over; it's all in the hands of the big boys.

I have BAILED!

Top 5 Reasons.

1) Very poor customer support, they may occasionally post on the forum they are listening but guessing it goes through one ear and out the other. They just don't care about the owners concerns.

2) Review policy.

3) Pricing is very high

4) Features, other websites have text message alerts, better search features, it seems VRBO is only developing new tools that bring them extra revenue but not improve the site.

5) ARROGANCE! It is time to bring this company down a notch.

The amount of inquiry, I am receiving has dropped significantly. My renewal is Dec, not sure if i will be renewing; will be spending some more on marketing my own site.

Going throught a redsigning of my site and testing multiple landing page to see which works best.

>> I'm curious if HA included the Opt Out of Review feature

>> in the upgrade would anyone reconsider renewing ?

Sorry, I really don't follow this question.  I want reviews for my property and certainly wouldn't opt-out of this.  I don't, however, agree with HA ranking properties who have more reviews -- that makes no sense to me since there are many legitimate reasons why some properties may not have many reviews (e.g. newly listed, owner not actively encouraging reviews, the type of renter, etc..)

What I disagree with -- and what I thought this thread was about -- is the unfair pricing policies and, specifically, the tiered system.

>>I have been giving this some thought and I have come to the conclusion  that

>>it is not the increase in the listing rate that bothers me so much.

A $1000 listing, for me, is about 10% of our GROSS for the year.  Given that I need to advertise on several sites in order to fill the property, the advertising budget to HA and VRBO can eat up to 20% of our gross income.  You'll notice that I sais gross income several times.  Imagine how much of our after-expense net income this represents.  Small properties like ours are rapidly being priced out of the HA and VRBO markets -- especially as the web sites' performance degrades over the years (and, yes, it has degraded significantly -- I've been a VRBO member since '07).

Hi do you offer online tourism marketing services to others?

Thanks for compiling this, vacationlady.

Do HomeAway ever comment here?

It would be interesting to hear what they have to say...

I wasn't sure where to post this message....and didn't know what to name a "new thread"....so I'll put it here.

I read on this forum, today, that some people got emails from HA/VRBO telling them they would be in Level 1. from January 5th....because they have "longevity and 16 photos"...so the new VRBO price structure places them in "first level position" because of their...is it "loyalty"? I'm not clear why they were placed in the new Level 1.    I did not get that email. {I got no email notice from VRBO today about new price structure ...where I would be placed, etc.}....but I did look in my file history for the date that my VRBO listing was first published...which was in 2001....so it's been 10 years. I too pay for 16 photos.  Longevity...loyalty...whatever. Anyway, I guess the rest of us will eventually "get the email".   But, while looking at my "old saved mails", I discovered that I have the final email sent from the  previous owners of VRBO! I thought some people might find it interesting, so I copied just a portion to "paste" here.  It was sent on Nov. 11, 2006, and the founders of VRBO, Dave & Lynn Clouse,  emailed to all the Owner members they had.  It was to tell us some exciting news after "seven months of coordinated effort" which resulted in selling VRBO to HomeAway, Inc..  They stated, they wanted "to make sure it was the best thing to do for VRBO and it's members before they took this step"....thus, it took them seven months of considerations. The email went on to include a "history" of VRBO, and their passion for it, as the creators....etc..  They further stated that they chose HomeAway.com to sell VRBO to because, "We felt a huge responsibility to choose someone with vision and passion for the "by owner" market, someone capable of taking VRBO to the next level. Further quote: "What Does This Mean to VRBO Members? - Don't expect any sweeping changes to VRBO. VRBO is a super-successful site and HomeAway wants to keep it the way it is, although we would like to make it easier to manage a listing on both VRBO and other HomeAway sites in the coming months. The same employees who have run VRBO for years will continue to operate the site, so please continue to contact VRBO customer service at webmaster@vrbo.com with any support issues. Dave and Lynn aren't going away either; in fact we believe in HomeAway so much that we are now one of its largest individual sharholders." UNQUOTE.  The email goes on to say more...and it includes a history of VRBO - The Early Years.  I guess then, that Dave & Lynn Close are happy.   Interesting.  P.S. I have the entire email if anyone wants me to send it to them.  I think it's too long to post here.

I am not renewing.  Have already taken steps to go my own way by setting up

a maintained webpage and linking to our community, making a page on facebook

and starting a blog.  Grrr!

I left because I first began with HomeAway for less than $150 a year.  And

at the time, if your place was rented and viewed frequently, it rose to the

top.  Now to rise to the top you pay much more and that is the only way to

rise to the top - period. It doesn't matter if your rental is, cute, clean

and you bend over backwards to please renter.  HomeAway went public and

seemed to want the small people (listers) to bend over and they would stick

it to them.  Unfair to small people.

"momof2pubs',  there are many issues involved....and we are a Community of very experienced Owners who have been "around" in business and in the HA Community as advertisers.  You should just read the threads to fill yourself in, at your leisure, from this forum. You may be new to "The System"....but don't think for a moment that you are not affected by all of this...from the day you signed up you became only another "property number".... not a client of HA.   And, you will soon realize that.  This has nothing to do with "capitalism"...as you seem to brush off all of the problems that Owners have been dealing with. They are real. They affect business. They affect return on investment [ROI}....they affect quality of Traveler/Owner relationships....and the bottom line of high premiums, low performance of The Service.  Many are not renewing for good reason. Inform yourself by reading the different threads in this Community Forum.

Bobbie, well they (HA and investors) to have a BIG wake up coming. The only folks on VRBO are soon going to be prop. managment  companies. When full dislcosure comes out ,,, well, watch out. ( and sell your HA stock RIGHT NOW)

If we want change, we owners must be willing to invest in the companies that are willing to provide a product that works for us. If we are only willing to spend our dollars on the site that brings us the most traffic, yet we sit around and grumble about it all day, we WILL be stuck with no options.

Someone needs to come up with a different model though. We don't need another VRBO or another HomeAway. And, it doesn't need to just be cheaper. It has to be different.

It is exhausting dealing with all the junk we deal with, be it incessant calls from the United in Uniform people, etc. That isn't what I mean by investing in other companies. Someone needs to present a better product.