How Does Evolve Work with Websites Like Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com and Others?

It’s never been easier to list and market your property on websites like Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com and others, right? A few photos, a decent write up, and you can just sit back and count money. If only. 

The fact is that every one of these rental marketplaces is constantly trying to improve, testing how to sort and rank their listings, testing changes to page layout to increase conversion, launching programs to improve the guest experience, and much more. 

None of them are simply rubber-stamping listings and waiting around for bookings. They’re using every tool at their disposal (and sometimes inventing new ones) to attract travelers and turn them into guests. More importantly, they’re not doing it on a case-by-case basis. They’re rolling changes out to thousands of properties at a time for meaningful testing. 

That’s where Evolve Vacation Rental comes in—and why our partnership with these sites achieves more for our owners than they could ever hope to gain from doing it themselves.

For websites like Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com, it’s a matter of scale 

All of the best vacation rental sites have one thing in common: enough inventory to satisfy searching travelers. While every individual property is important, it’s the total of all properties that creates real demand and, ultimately, drives bookings. People like demand choices. So while every owner is important, one owner is also only one data point, if you’re focused on constant learning and innovation. At the individual property level, it’s impossible to identify larger trends or to understand the difference between a limited quirk or bug from a sitewide issue that needs attention. To truly learn, tests need to be run at a larger scale. 

So when websites like Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com and others look at Evolve, they see a portfolio of tens of thousands properties with a single point of contact. They see a management company actively trying to improve their listing performance. They see a team ready to work directly with them and innovate alongside them. Most importantly, they see the scale they need to learn how to win more bookings. And that matters a great deal. 

One owner can certainly be heard. But Evolve amplifies the voices of all of our owners. Let’s look at how. 

Optimizing property listings on websites like Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com

From the moment a traveler begins to search for a vacation rental, a dizzying amount of logic and coding begins leading them to the right property. Everything from the order of listings on a search results page to the text on the page to the placement of each button is intentional, trying for a perfect match of searcher to destination. 

You can learn the basics of high-converting property listings and try to stay on top of any announced changes or improvements on websites like Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com. But the fact is, you’ll never have all the information or options available. You’ll always be left wondering if there’s more you could do to improve your listing.

Evolve Vacation Rental has entire teams dedicated to listing creation, photography, rate-setting, reviews and more. Even better, our partnership with websites like Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com means that we participate in beta tests of new features, get insider information on listing best practices, even make suggestions to them for improvements. 

We don’t have to guess. We meet with our partner teams weekly to discuss regional trends in listing performance and how we can stay way ahead of the curve to keep our properties well-positioned for success. 

Pioneering programs on all of the best vacation rental sites

When it’s time to test a new program, websites like Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com don’t call individual owners; they call management companies like Evolve to quickly launch on thousands of properties. It’s a built-in advantage of our size and partnership. We’re one of their largest accounts and we enjoy dedicated support from our partners.

For example, when Vrbo launched a specific program during the height of the pandemic, Evolve partnered with their team to launch the policy across thousands of qualifying properties in a fraction of the time it would have taken otherwise. Programs like these give guests more confidence in booking and helps set apart vacation rentals with progressive policies.

There are other examples, such as Evolve being invited by Airbnb to discuss changes in party policies at homes. Whatever the case, each of our owners benefited from our partnership without lifting a finger.

Personal and technical connections to all of the best vacation rental sites

It should be clear by now that websites like Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com view Evolve Vacation Rental as a valuable partner, not simply a customer. 

Any rental owner can call the 1-800 number to speak with customer service. By contrast, Evolve’s CEO has an open line of communication with the President of Vrbo. And one of our initial investors and board members also sits on the board of Booking Holdings. We’ve spent years cultivating relationships and building custom technology to make the most of all of our partnerships.

Cultivating relationships with Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com and others

We have a full-time team dedicated to our partners and, in return, our partners have dedicated account managers for Evolve Vacation Rental. They speak daily and meet at least weekly to learn the best ways to streamline our relationships and make the biggest impact. In fact, some account managers know our business so well that they feel like Evolve employees are embedded in their company, rather than the other way around. 

“For 9 years Evolve has been helping Vrbo achieve its mission to bring families together. We value Evolve’s commitment to enabling delightful experiences for travelers while also helping homeowners successfully own and responsibly rent their cherished vacation homes.”

– Kevin Locraft, VP, Global Sales Strategy and Operations at Vrbo

Custom integrations for better guest experiences 

On the technical side, Evolve has built custom API integrations with all of our partners to streamline coordination of data and service delivery. Put simply, we automate whatever we can to create an ideal guest experience–a huge win for guests looking for true hospitality and something an individual owner could only ever do manually. 

For example, we created an auto-response delivered automatically through Airbnb messenger that delivers everything a guest needs to know about a property. It also lets them know we’ll follow up as needed. Overall, it puts the guest at ease that they’ll get whatever answers they need as quickly as possible rather than wondering if a host will reply in a timely or helpful manner.

An individual owner would have to be on the phone practically 24/7 to deal with every question, inquiry, issue, or review from guests. Our custom technology gives us an edge and ensures we can deliver the right guest experience on any platform. 

Evolve works with websites like Airbnb–but we’d love to work with you.  

Join Evolve and you’ll never be on your own, stressing over the time-consuming parts of vacation rental management (like how Airbnb works).

Our fresh approach to management takes marketing, booking, and customer support tasks off your plate, so you can focus on the other aspects of your business. We drive more guests to your property for maximum income while giving you more choices, fewer rules, and an industry-low 10% fee (that’s backed by our Risk-Free Guarantee).