Screenshot of a basic Rentmix.com search - click image to enlarge.
Rentmix.com launches to improve rental search
“Our goal is to be the Google of vacation rentals: fast, simple, elegant,” says the Rentmix.com team. By now, you’ve probably heard of AirBnB and HomeAway, but taking advantage of streamlining the search process, Rentmix.com has launched to pull all vacation and short term rental data from AirBnB, HomeAway and FlipKey and pulls it all on to one full-screen map.
When you find something that interests you, clicking on “Full Details and Contact Owner,” you are taken to the original listing on one of the aforementioned sites, and everyone wins! The quick rent scenario and vacation rentals are taking the travel world by storm, with many people opting for a more home-like stay in an actual house or cottage, as some people sincerely don’t like hotels, often citing sterility and cold decor.
With Rentmix, you simply tell it where you’re going, when and how much you want to spend, and in a streamlined, simple to view interface, you can simply click a pin and see details on the side of your screen without being taken away from the map and having to start over and over or hop from site to site to site. Brilliant! We also love that it isn’t cluttered with junky ads, it is very easy on the eyes and consistent from page to page from city to city.
Although many on our team use AirBnB.com to search for rentals and it does a superior job of showing nearby restaurants and attractions, this opens up some new possibilities many of us hadn’t considered. The problem we see right off the bat is that not all information is being aggregated, but perhaps it is coming – for example, there are hundreds of listings for Oklahoma City on AirBnB.com but literally none on Rentmix, so we’re betting it is a work in progress.
If anyone is traveling during major conference season like during South by Southwest, the city is often booked solid, but Rentmix could find hidden options that you won’t find on the mainstream travel site. Most of these sites like AirBnB offer insurance for the renter and rentee, and they are aiming to be as secure as hotels, a move which has us taking a second look at vacation rentals, even for short stays outside of our city.
