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OwnerWebs - Our Story

   Are you tired of online travel agencies dictating your vacation rental business? Do you remember a time when you truly connected with your guests and built your own customer base? In 2008, I purchased my first vacation rental home in Silverthorne, Colorado, and those were truly the "good ol' days" for owners. Back then, you could list a property on the only popular vacation rental website, and leads flowed directly to you through inquiries. You received potential guests' phone numbers and email addresses, allowing you to reach out, build relationships, and cultivate a solid customer base. For about $500 USD per year, that listing more than paid for itself with direct 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 reservation, 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 transformation 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 e-commerce 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, and all of my technical skills to build OwnerWebs. OwnerWebs 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. OwnerWebs 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).

   OwnerWebs 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!