In the realm of peer to peer rental lodging there are a lot of companies competing for your business. I wrote an overview of the options with my recommendations for the most efficient places to search for a place to rent. But now that Vakast has come on the scene I need to update my suggestions. Vakast combines peer to peer rental offerings from most of the major sites (except AirBnB) with traditional rental results from Hostelworld, Priceline, Agoda and a few specialty sites. And on July 31 Vakast closed a $1.3 million seed funding round.
There should be a fair amount of overlap in the results you get from a search on Vakast and the same search on Tripping, the other vacation lodging consolidation site. But the user experiences are different and it’s worth checking out both.
I’ve updated my conclusion from my May, 2014 review of peer to peer lodging sites. If you want a standard vacation rental that’s not in one of the special categories (listed in my original post), and in a location for which I haven’t identified any companies focused specifically, I’d search in three places: Airbnb, Vakast and Tripping. That will cover the vast majority of options out there. And this will let you compare peer to peer lodging prices with hotel and hostel prices to make sure you’re getting the best deal for your money.
For a list of all the peer to peer rental lodging sites check out this table: 