PhoCusWright Travel Innovator: LiveRez.com

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