13 November 2008 ~ Comments

PhoCusWright Travel Innovator: LiveRez.com

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Looks like Vacation Rentals are a theme this year at PhoCusWright.  A recent press release announcing PhoCusWright’s recent study “PhoCusWright’s Vacation Rental Marketplace: Poised for Change” identifies the vacation rental market as an up and coming segment of the accommodation market and values it at over $24 Billion.  LiveRez.com as well as a couple of other innovators including Escapia.com and VacationRoost.com are fighting for dominance of this market.

LiveRez.com offers a web based vacation rental management system that allows vacation rental managers to better manage their properties.  There is no demo of the management system and only a one page list of features (which are a bit vague) so we may have to wait for the Travel Innovation Summit to actually see what it can do.  There is a demo of their consumer website available at http://template2.liverez.com/.

LiveRez.com also offers an interesting service called RezSecure which appears to be a certification program for property owners.  I wanted to find out more information about the RezSecure program but unfortunately at the time of posting the link was broken: Update – Nov. 14th: The Link has been updated to a screen shot of the forthcoming RezSecure site.

Questions:

1. What is it about LiveRez that is innovative? Business model? Application?

2. How does LiveRez.com differentiate itself from competitors like Escapia.com and VacationRoost.com?

3. LiveRez.com appears to be focusing on a very service driven offering with value add offerings like marketing and consulting.  Is this the case?

Additional notes:

Upon further review, I noted that the following items were not working or displaying properly:

  • Company tab on home page shows no content
  • Information tab on home page shows no content
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  • Stephen - Thanks for the mention. Here are a couple of points of clarification:
    1. RezSecure is the service we are launching next week at PhocusWright. Not SecureRez - no affiliation with SecureRez. The website for RezSecure will be up soon. Please correct this in the above post.
    2. LiveRez is different in that we only offer an experience that allows travelers to BOOK the property. Others in the market allow travelers to only Search, Shop, Email/Phone Call/Inquiry. That is not what travelers want - they want to BOOK. We are all about Search, Shop , BOOK.
    3. Innovative - we have a partnership business model with Vacation Rental managers that allows them to take their business online for a minimal investment and then it is a pay-for-performance model for a complete solution, including online mktg services. This is the foundation for RezSecure which only provides certified vacation managers with the ability to take bookings, not just inquiries.
    4. Our success depends on the success of our 'partners' (that is how we refer to our vacation manager customers). We do all we can to make them successful, providing them any services to help drive bookings is important to us.

    (not clear about your comment on the Info and Company tab)

    Feel free to contact me directly with any questions or comments. Ralf@LiveRez.com

    Ralf
  • Hi Ralf,

    Thanks for the clarification. I've made some updates and fixes based on your comment:

    1. I've updated the name to RezSecure, sorry about that. Although at the time I wrote the post, the site did go to a directory listing page. It does happen and I'm happy it has been updated. I have updated to show the screenshot.

    2. VacationRoost.com seems to offer "Request Information" but Clearstay.com (which is an Escapia B2C) offers booking as well.

    3. I can see your RezSecure program being very attractive. That definitely seems like a key differentiator.

    Best of luck with the presentation and I look forward to meeting you at PCW. Thanks again for providing more details. It is always nice to get corrections, clarifications, and more info from owners.
  • I concur that this summit is heavily weighted with vacation rental companies. It's a fascinating, highly fragmented industry that has great companies and minds working on solving key problems.

    It's also important to note HomeAway is not presenting today but will be on a panel tomorrow. For those unfamiliar with HomeAway and the recent news, check out:
    http://thesociety.com/blog/2008/11/big-news-in-...

    Cheers, Mike
  • Yes, ClearStay.com offers online bookings as well as ratings & reviews. There are a number of other sites on the market as well that have online bookings. They make this happen by integrating with back-end software lilke Escapia.
  • I'm a little late to comment on this, but just spending a Friday afternoon catching up on some blog posts. There's been a related post over at Travolution (http://www.travolution.co.uk/blog/2008/12/holid...) that may be of interest to anyone reading this.

    For me there has been some highly relevant points raised here, namely (in my mind) the massive fragmentation that currently exists and also the importance of online booking. If this industry wants to compete with alternative forms of accommodation (namely hotels) then I feel it needs to operate on a level playing field. Instant online booking is a very big part of that. And it comes with a new set of complications.
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