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Today I got a call from a call center, which was obviously located in India. It was from AlwaysOnVacation.com. The caller could barely speak English and was offering me a free listing. I bothered him for awhile and then told him I wasn’t interested. I think it does a disservice to a vacation rental listing company to solicit new business using a foreign call center. How did they get my phone number? It doesn’t matter. I think it smells of desperation. They could barely speak English, barely.

Funny thing is, they just called me again, my phone number must have been on the list twice. This time I went ahead and pretended I wanted to add a property for free. The details were that I would get 5 free queries and 10 pictures for my listing. They gave me a url to go and list my property. I should publish the URL, but I don’t want to further publicize this crap. It’s obviously a way to track the effectiveness of the call center.

Once I went the URL, the Indian guy told me he ad to transfer me to his superior. I told him that was great and then I hung up…I was at the URL and had no need to talk to anyone else. Once I entered my info in the form, the listing wasn’t even real-time!! They said they would contact me in 24-48 hours. Boy, this firm doesn’t get it.

Turns out AlwaysOnVacation.com is owned by a company called VacationRenters, LLC. They own several vacation rental properties and appear to own some property management software and an online booking engine. I went to all of the websites and determined from first glance that it’s some sort of failed shell entity. I sent off an email to one of their contacts with some questions on how to add their booking engine properties to my site, but I doubt I’ll ever hear back. The websites have little or no information and appear to be incomplete. Just another vacation rental company that doesn’t get it.

There are so many vacation rental listing companies that have too much overhead. They’ve got people for sales, marketing and development and most of them are overpaid, because a typical US based employee is grossly overpaid for the productivity level they bring to the table. Here at VacationRentalDirect.com we are going to remain mean and lean, utilizing every marketing tool, every outsourced resource we can to keep our overhead low and our prices lower.

It’s the only way to keep developing a great site in a industry that requires many years and lots of work to deliver substantial results to vacation rental owners.