Use airline booking portals to evade VRBO damage deposits
/I like staying in hotels. This isn’t a normative judgment, if anything it’s a confession that like everyone on Earth I’m the product of my upbringing: growing up, when my family traveled we stayed in a chaotic variety of tents, trailers, condos, cabins, and lodges. So given control over my own accommodations, I naturally gravitate towards the neat, clean, uniform sterility of hotel rooms (although they’re rarely in the same condition when I’m done with them).
This leaves me at loose ends when I need to book vacation stays for larger groups, whether it’s a family reunion or just friends getting together at the beach. Last April I tried to solve this problem by signing up for the Barclay Wyndham Rewards Earner Business card, but that didn’t pan out because Barclay wanted more information about my business than I was able or willing to provide, which put me back at square one when it came to booking an upcoming vacation in Florida.
Booking vacation homes is no treat
A curious thing that’s nevertheless impossible to avoid knowing about our late capitalist order is how abstracted it’s become.
The joke I always tell is that when Ticketmaster first started their grifting operation, “service fees” were a tax on tourists: if you lived in town, you could always go to the box office and buy your own tickets without paying the fee.
Today, if you go to the box office of a theater that uses Ticketmaster, they’ll charge you the same fee you’d pay online, and if you’re unlucky, an “in-person ticketing” service fee as well. This is, understandably, because they hate us and want us to become poorer, while they become richer.
I encountered a version of this situation while booking that upcoming stay in Florida. I knew early on that I’d need a rental that had multiple bedrooms and bathrooms, a kitchen, and was near the beach, but didn’t have any real idea how to find one. So I started checking which of my existing resources fit the bill.
Hotels.com: I have a modest OneKeyCash balance, so booking a stay with their integrated VRBO platform seemed like a good start.
Delta.com/stays: I have an American Express Delta Platinum Business card, which offers $200 off $200 in Delta Stays reservations per calendar year, so this could be a good way to knock that credit out early in the year — the earlier the better.
US Bank Flexperks Travel Rewards: I have a balance of Flexpoints that are worth 1.5 cents each towards hotels and airfare, the equivalent of 3% cash back on grocery store manufactured spend.
To my surprise, these three booking channels produced entirely different results. US Bank’s travel booking portal didn’t show any home rentals at all, so those points were off the table. But to my (ultimately pleasant) surprise, Hotels.com, VRBO, and the airline booking portals offered the same properties, with different booking terms.
VRBO charges bizarre damage deposits, but their affiliate networks don’t
As I narrowed in on the specific area and properties I was interested in, I naturally started checking which booking portals would offer the lowest price after taking into account online rebates and credit card bonuses. VRBO had a 2% payout on the Capital One shopping portal, and I could use my OneKeyCash to reduce the upfront price, but I was taken aback by the final page of their booking process: a $1500 fee refundable “at the discretion of the host.”
It may go without saying but I don’t pay money “at the discretion” of anybody else. I once canceled a credit card in order to evade an overweight baggage fee that TAP Portugal tried (and failed) to charge me. I take this stuff seriously.
What I quickly discovered was that the same property I’d narrowed in on was available through airline affiliate booking channels, with neither the $59 protection fee nor the $1,500 damage deposit. I ultimately booked the property through Alaska Airlines’ affiliate channel, since I ended up using my $200 annual Delta Stays credit at a different property on the trip.
Conclusion
This is the kind of exercise that reminds me why I got into travel hacking, let alone blogging about travel hacking, in the first place. We are told throughout our lives that we are, in economics terms “price takers,” and that all the prices we pay for everything are determined in advance by forces far beyond our control.
But that’s not true, and the companies we buy services from don’t believe it’s true either.
We are, in fact price setters, because we get to decide what we’re willing to pay for. And the more tools we have to set our own prices, the lower the prices we will eventually pay.
