VillaRenters / Rental Systems

Both Villarenters.com and RentalSystems.com are owned by the Daily Mail & General Trust and managed by their subsidiary Teletext Holidays.

RS provide you with online rental business software and advertising (and hopefully bookings) from their marketing site Villarenters.com (currently about 21,000 properties mainly focussed in Europe) and they also have an affiliate network (agents who may also be running localised websites with your property automatically appearing on). Properties also appear on Teletext ( but its selective and depends on your ranking within the RS system)
There’s no marketing exclusivity – you’re free to market elsewhere but still use RS software  to manage your bookings and payments.You can ‘preload’ messages (such as driving instructions etc) and they, together with payment reminders and follow-ups, get sent automativally to your customer. The biggest downside is they have their own form of rental contract which you cannot change to suit any specific requirements you may have. You don’t have direct contact with your customer until after the 10% comission has been taken, and there are penalties for transferring your booking deposits/final payments to your bank account earlier than their standard time periods.

Any booking generated by Villarenters costs 10 % in commission, which is deducted from your 1st booking payment received from the customer.You can also choose to manage bookings from other sources through RS – including credit card payment, escrow management of damages and seciruty deposits, etc – for a charge of 2% of the rental price (but still cheaper than Paypal)

Of course, you can’t have links to your own website. They have an Instant Booking facility which can be powerful as there’s evidence – some anecdotal – that this helps increase booking rates. Instant gratifaction! VR claim Instant Booking helps conversions by a factor of 4 times.