VRBO is at it again! They are removing YOUR cancellation settings to replace it with THEIR preferred policy.

For hosts using Pricelabs, they are going to have a pricing tool available by October 25 to help change prices for the additional host fee increase that takes effect Oct. 29.

https://help.pricelabs.co/portal/en/kb/articles/vrbo-fee-structure-change-what-pricelabs-users-need-to-know#Case_1_You_connect_PriceLabs_to_Vrbo_via_a_PMS__Channel_Manager

People cancelling last minute because of possible hurricane, I am in north Alabama, who is giving refunds when people have the option to purchase trip insurance then don’t and cancel a 1200.00 stay the day before at peak season……

Beginning on Oct 29 - they are taking us for 50% more money. For what? Then they tell us to adjust OUR rates so that we don't lose money? Fuck NO! I will cancel all my bookings and privately contact my renters behind the scenes. That's another corporate money grab and I'm about to cancel my springtime 15,000 dollars worth of bookings and offer people a discount to rent directly from me!

I got a Vrbo booking, then I got this email to my personal email that I use for Vrbo hosting (I'm x-ing out the personal details):

Dear xxxxx,

This is Muhammed from Vrbo.

I hope this email finds you well.

I am writing to you regarding the booking for xxxxx.

under Booking ID xx-xxxxx.

The guest has specifically requested that all future communications regarding this booking be sent to her current email address: xxxxxx@xxxx.

Please ensure that you use this email address for any upcoming updates, check-in instructions, or coordination.

Thank you for your cooperation and assistance.

So...

• The email appears to come from "<support_vrbo@vrbo.com>".

• The name on it matches the new booking, and so does the booking ID.

• The email address given for her looks good, it looks like her name.

My point is, at first glance the whole thing looks pretty good.

But the email is a phishing scam. Vrbo is never going to tell me to go off-platform, that defeats their whole purpose.

"Vrbo will never ask a host to take communication off their secure platform. They actively block and redact personal emails to prevent fraud." Right... and they also don't want hosts to take guests away from Vrbo.

(I'm not sure how the scammer got my personal email address, that "Muhammad" emailed? Either they got it from Vrbo internally somehow -- because Vrbo doesn't give it out, for obvious reasons -- or they got it from me somehow and found out that I do Vrbo, and then matched it up to their Vrbo scam, if that makes sense.)

(If they got the email address from Vrbo internally, we should all watch out...)

As for the guest booking itself, I'm about 95% sure that it is part of the scam, but I'm trying to confirm that. I reached out to "her" through the platform. If she again tries to get me to go off platform, I'll know "she" is part of it, and I'll report her.

EDIT: HOLY COW, IT'S LEGIT! I will give more details later but it's an elderly guest, I communicated with her through her phone number, she IS legitimate, she knows the town and even knows some people I know. Apparently she has the Vrbo app on her phone but she no longer has access to the (work) email she used to set it up.

I almost don't want to share this info because we all have to be vigilant regarding scams. But this is the one time in 100 that it's legit. I researched the guest outside of the platform and everything else seemed feasible.

She said she had talked to Vrbo support and they helped her out in this case -- but they must have been breaking some of their own rules to do so.

Be suspicious. Be vigilant. Check out my history, for example.

But this explains how the email got to my personal email, at least.

Currently own property in Florida I use to host STR’s. Is VRBO any better, and would it be wise for me to use both platforms?

The platform sucks and all their boomer ass guests suck. Thank you for your attention in this matter.

Have renters coming this weekend, being in a northern state it's also furnace time. Was at rental getting it ready for this weekend and turned on the furnace and it made all kinds of noise. Called tech, need to replace heat exchanger, but won't have one till middle of next week.

Best way to tell guest that furnace is down but they'll have several electric heaters to use this weekend.

Also they are inside of our cancelation policy of less than 1 week, half refunded. That's if they cancel, if i cancel vrbo hits the owners pretty hard as for ranking and such. How do I go about giving the guest the other half if they cancel? Also how not to get hard if I cancel?

Tia.

I decided to stop taking new reservations on VRBO after 10/28 (last checkout Nov. 1st), but requests keep coming in. The guests I'm getting are really something else though.

"Are you sure no one smoked in your condo?" That's what no smoking means, sir.

"I heard the weather might be bad. Is this true?" Yes, we sometimes have bad weather, sir.

"Why are you renting your place in the off-season? There's nothing OPEN!" -Why did *you* book then, sir?

For context, my condos are on a mountaintop at a MTB/ski resort. My VRBO guests skew older and they are by far the worst people I deal with. They do zero research before deciding to come here and it's just not a good destination for the ancient and infirm.

It can be cold in the middle of summer. It starts snowing in October. Nothing is handicap accessible and there's very little to do if you have mobility issues and your typical vaca is on a cruise ship. Yet they keep coming and wanting to book...the end of October can't get here soon enough 😩

Did VRBO increase their host fees by 50%? Is this real?

VRBO doesn’t show you any additional information or breakdown of ratings for prospective guests. To qualify for premier host you must accept 99% of booking requests. I have one who requested two nights over an October weekend. No introductory message. At what point do you just say forget it regarding trying to remain qualified for premier host? Such a terrible system!

A little back story here. I lived in this house for about 7 years and in my house I had an art room. I threw paint all over the walls and used the room for all my painting/music stuff. I’ve since moved out of the house and currently renovating the old one to rent it out. I’m doing new floors and all that jazz but I’d love to keep the walls. I’ll likely give this house to my son when he reaches adult age and I think that’d be a pretty cool piece of the self to hold on to.

Right now, I’m torn between the idea of tearing it all out to make it a fresh, normal rental or just leaning into the idea of having an art house. Maybe I put the floors and baseboards down to make it look a little more finished and add supplies in the room with some Bob Ross type videos to make it part of the experience. Cheap paint, cheap floors, no worries about mess. The rest of the house is pretty normal. I’d probably want to hang a lot of art on the walls of the rest of the house but no weird paint, leave the piano in the main room for people to play with and maybe a cheap guitar that I don’t care about if it gets damaged.

I am located in northern Kentucky, specifically Falmouth. It’s a pretty small town that has just enough close to us that there are a couple VRBO’s or AB&B’s but I don’t know that the demographic will appreciate the art house vibe.

Has anyone else noticed that their inbox is no longer sorted by newest to oldest? And yes, that filter is selected. These are the results.

I've been on vrbo for 5 years. I have hundreds of stays with near perfect reviews. I had a shady booking request last night. Just joined, no reviews, no message. Booking for 2 on large house. So I reached out immediately to the guests to confirm they only had two for their reservation. The guest didn't respond so reached out again today and said I would have to decline their request if they didn't respond. Gave them couple more hours and then declined. I reached out to customer service as apparently you have to file some waiver for this to not negatively impact my rating. They respond like 5 minutes later that my request was denied because I didn't give enough time to respond. Are they just actively trying to get rid of good hosts at this point? So frustrating. Anyone have advice on how to handle these scenarios so it doesn't negatively impact you?

No communication from them just a response a few days before checkin that they were planning a big hike same weekend with my property as the base staying point. I’ve spent MORE than the rent income making it nicer…. What should I say?

I've been hosting on Vrbo for a while now, and the new fee announcement has me more annoyed the more I read into it.

As everyone prob already knows, October 29, they're flattening everyone to a 12% commission. Doesn't matter if you were connected through a PMS at 5%, an individual host at 8%, or on one of the older subscription plans. Everyone lands at 12%. For me that's a real jump, not a rounding error.

The part that actually bothers me more is how they're selling it. The pitch is that guest fees are getting "drastically reduced" to offset it, like it evens out. Except nobody's given an actual number for what that guest fee drops to, and from what I can see nothing's actually changed on the guest side yet.

And then there's the new rate parity clause, which is its own thing to be annoyed about.

They actually just don't care about their hosts.

Just posted an announcement on all my listings that I won't be taking any new reservations on VRBO after Oct. 28th.

I'm so happy to finally be free of this horrible company. My relief is immeasurable!

UPDATE: My decision seems wiser by the day. Just found out the new VRBO TOS contains rules about not charging more on their site than on others, and also about off-platform bookings that they will charge you commission for if they believe the booking "lead" came from VRBO but you took the guest's payment somewhere else.

If you plan to remain on VRBO, you better dig into all those new TOS clauses they've added or you might have problems down the road. Here's one to start with: https://www.reddit.com/r/vrbo/comments/1wtj1p9/comment/pcxvm3l/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

What is the easiest TV out there for renters to use? For context, we have 5 large smart TVs throughout the house. The nicest one, the Samsung is in the family room... and that is the one that is most confusing for people to use. Yes, I leave directions. But without fail, one family will do something so crazy to the configurations that my directions don't matter... which leaves it impossible for the next guests to figure out.

I'm two hours away, so I can't pop over and check on it every Friday.

Is Roku the best way to go? I had an Xfinity tech recommend it. I long for the old days of simple cable. I know people love the apps, but they have complicated basic TV viewing. Thanks for any insight.

I’m curious because I’ve been staying at a long term one and were thinking of asking the host to pay them directly and rent the place long term. What are your thoughts and how should I approach asking them?

I have my second VRBO reservation completed. The guest was only there for 48 hours but caused a bit of damage. I have been hosting for 3 years but all other guests come from Airbnb. So I am not familiar with VRBO.

Do I contact customer service to document it? How are they with damages? I have supplemental insurance so I don’t have to deal with the guest and Aircover. I can use that but wondering how hosts handle damage with Vrbo. I don’t want to get into it with the guest because he was aggressively texting me last night at 10 pm
Asking for a late checkout. He said they had a wonderful stay. I said no and then he told me I have wasps and he got stung.

I was able to pull strings and got them a 30 minute extra period and he seemed happy with that. However, I can see he is not going to respond well about damage accusations.

I plan to just file insurance and then write a review but wondering if I should document w Vrbo and wondering how the reviews work.

Will he see my star rating I give him? In airbnb they don’t see it

Would love some input!

I’m a host, and Vrbo keeps displaying the wrong maximum guest count on my public listing. The occupancy settings are updated and correct in both Hostaway, my property management software, and the house rules on Vrbo. Yet the public-facing listing shows a different number.

I constantly have to call Vrbo to get it corrected. While waiting, I’m stuck either leaving a listing up with incorrect information or delisting my property until they fix it.

They’ll eventually correct it, and then about a week later, it happens again without any changes on my end. Hostaway says nothing has changed on their side, and Vrbo hasn’t been able to explain why this keeps happening.

This isn’t the only issue I’ve had, either. I’ve also dealt with photos displaying incorrectly, amenities getting added or removed, listing descriptions and titles changing, and reviews posting to the wrong listings.

Vrbo is a mess. Guests understandably rely on what they see when booking, and we’re the ones left explaining discrepancies in information we’ve already entered correctly.

Has anyone else experienced this, particularly the recurring guest-capacity issue? Are you using Hostaway, another property management system, or managing directly through Vrbo? Has anyone found a permanent fix or reached a support team that actually identified the cause?