Otalo – vacation home rentals aggregator
We spent a lot of time last year talking about the importance of aggregators and hypothesizing on how many more we would see come to life in 2009. Well already, a recent start up, Otalo, a vacation home rentals aggregator, is causing a bit of noise in the industry.
My thoughts are that Otalo will find it relatively easy to penetrate the real estate vertical space, because of its niche focus and its appeal to well deserved leisure time. Most importantly, there isn’t one site that has mastered the serving up of vacation home rentals online, as of yet.
The way Otalo works is that vacation seekers tell the search giant where they want to go, using either a plain text search or by clicking the region on a very intuitive map. Otalo then searches the Web to find vacation rentals in the seekers desired geography. Although Otalo does allow you to refine search by things such as pets, smoke free, waterfront, etc…, I would have liked to have been able to search by style of home, to ensure I get exactly what I want and quickly. Otalo also allows the user to see a map depiction of the city or town their rental resides in, but they are using the basic Google Maps and it does not allow the user to turn on a hybrid or hyper map view. I would have preferred to see something similar to what Zillow is using for their map view or at least turn on some of the additional features Google Maps can provide.
Nonetheless, the Otalo platform is a welcomed addition to my holiday hunting site arsenal, as it simplifies the consumer search process and promotes one stop shopping. Oh yeah, did I mention you could invite your travel buddies to view any and all accommodations of interest on Otalo? Neat huh…
