Owner Webs - Our Story

In 2008, I purchased my first vacation rental home in Silverthorne, Colorado. This was the good ol' days of owning vacation rental properties. This was when a person could purchase a property and post it to a popular (the only one that was popular back then) vacation rental website and generate leads through inquiries made through potential guests. Any time there was interest in your property the potential guest's phone number and email address would be sent to you so you could reach out. It was an excellent way to build a following and a solid customer base for your vacation rental. The cost was only about $500 USD per year, and the listing more than paid for itself with all of the leads that eventually ended up in reservations.

Now, fast forward an entire decade plus a few years. For better or for worse (with a whole lot of worse), the vacation rental industry has dramatically changed! Millions more short term rental (strs) properties have been added to the market. There's no longer one popular site, but now several very large online travel agencies (OTAs). Long gone are the days where potential guests are routed to you where you can do business with them directly. The OTAs hide this information from you, revealing in some cases only a telephone number if they book your property on the OTA's website. From there it is your responsibility to give access to your property to a stranger whom you've never met, who did business with the OTA that has no ownership in your property, who takes handsome fees from both you and the guests. If you refuse a reversation your ratings with these OTAs fall, and they suppress you in their search results. Should a dispute arise the OTAs are likely to side with the guests even if they are wrong. You are likely pressured by the OTAs to loosen your cancellation policies so guests can cancel and receive full refunds, leaving you without revenue and an empty vacation home.

Around 2014 or so, while all of the aforementioned tranformation was in play, I began building websites for my vacation properties to counterbalance these changes from the OTAs. My livelihood is built from owning and operating ecommerce websites that exist in a fiercely competitive marketplace, a world where if people do not find our products and buy them it is not possible to stay in business. I put this energy into my vacation rental property websites. As such, all of my vacation rental websites are found in internet searches. Guests find my websites, contact me, and book direct with me.

I've brought all of my energy, all of my lessons-learned, all of my technical skills to build Owner Webs. Owner Webs is a website production apparatus that gives vacation rental property owners the power to easily build a fully functional book-direct website just for their property. Two years of programming (and occasional crying) have been poured into this project to bring it to its launch. Owner Webs is a platform built for you that brings forward the things we liked in the past, brings forward the things we like that have been developed, and leaves behind those things that should have never happened (like being denied direct access to our guests).

Owner Webs has so many good things to direct bookings to you, and help you become less dependent upon OTAs. So many good things are still coming!

Start Building