Roseville, CA, January 30th, 2007. VRConnection, a leading provider of marketing and management solutions for second home owners who have chosen to offer their properties as a vacation rental, announced it has processed its 5,000th booking transaction via their innovative web service. In two short years, VRConnection has begun to revolutionize the way vacation rental owners offer their properties and administer their tenants.
“While vacation rentals are the fastest growing segment of the travel accommodation marketplace, procuring a stay at one remains somewhat of a challenge, especially in this era of 24/7 online booking,” says Drew Rudman, founder of VRConnection. “Vacation rentals are usually someone’s second home, so most owners are unwilling to rent it to just anybody sight unseen, preferring instead to engage in a dialogue to make sure that the guest and property are a good fit. The standard, unattended online booking mechanism you find on most travel websites also lacks the personal touch most owners desire, but the conventional ‘back-in-forth’ of e-mails and phone calls in order to actually procure a booking can oftentimes inconvenience a traveler and result in a missed opportunity. We believe our innovative online offer/acceptance procedure strikes the right balance between personal touch and professionalism.”
VRConnection offers a unique and inventive approach to booking a stay at a vacation rental. Prospective guests make an inquiry for specific dates, just as they have come to expect from the hundreds of websites that offer vacation rental accommodations. Owners and managers receive these inquiries and can perform whatever due diligence they deem necessary to ensure a successful stay. When an owner is comfortable that there is a good fit, VRConnection provides a web based mechanism to extend an offer to the prospective tenant via e-mail. The process provides the prospective guest with a link to actually accept and confirm the booking. All tenant contact information is collected, rental agreements automatically generated, presented, and acknowledged, and payment options provided. The procurement process can occur at any time of the day, freeing owner and guest from the ‘dance’ they have traditionally performed by mailing, e-mailing, and faxing forms and payments. The time savings alone is worth VRConnection’s modest flat annual fee, but the real benefit lies in the resulting higher percentage of inquiry conversions into bookings.
“An additional issue addressed by our approach has to do with pricing”, Mr. Rudman continues. “Unlike your typical hotel room which maintains a standard nightly ‘rack rate’, vacation rentals are priced in a myriad of ways. Seasonally, by length of stay, number of occupants, etc. There is usually no easy way to accurately quote the cost of a stay at your typical vacation rental in an unattended mode. Since our approach involves the owner actually extending an offer electronically, they are able to precisely configure the cost amounts based on the nature of the reservation. In this way, the prospective tenant knows exactly the terms of the stay and there are no surprises.”
VRConnection’s electronic offer/acceptance facility is but one step in their overall approach. The service offers vacation rental owners a complete suite of tools to market their properties, process inquiries, convert them into bookings, manage tenants, and analyze success from any computer with an Internet connection. For more information, please visit
www.vrconnection.com .
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Contact:
Deanne Rudman
VRConnection
(916) 705-6811
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http://www.vrconnection.com 
