My family and I just had the experience of renting a house from Vacasa at the Oregon coast beach. We had to go to the Oregon coast for the weekend for my daughters gymnastics meet and instead of driving there and back we wanted to make a weekend out of it because a little mini vacation is always fun.
We had a couple different options for places to stay. We could have gone the traditional hotel route or we could rent a house or condo.
Renting a hotel had it’s limitations and advantages.
Some of the limitations were:
- It’s expensive
- No pets allowed
- No kitchen
- No central place to hang out such as a kitchen table.
Some of the advantages are
- You can stay only 1 night if need be
- Pool and hot tub
- You usually know exalted what you are getting
For us we have a family of 5 and a dog. Plus the kids Grandma, Grandpa and Aunt were wanting to come to the coast with us also. If we would have went the hotel route we would have probably had to get at least 3 rooms and not bring the dog and that would have been expensive all the way around and as a parent I do not want to share a room with my kids. I love them in all but it’s nice to have some privacy.
So we went the house rental route.
The advantages of renting a house are:
- Inexpensive if you have people to share it with
- multiple rooms
- kitchen
- Dining room where you can play games and eat
Some of the disadvantages are:
- Usually you have to stay more than one night
- You really do not know what you are getting until you get there
- limited supply
When renting a house or condo you have a few different options
- Vacasa
- VRBO
- Homeaway
- AirBnb
These are all good options and we have had a good experience with all of them.
Vacasa
Vacasa is coming strong onto the scene. They are headquartered in Portland, OR and are growing like crazy. They started out by only having properties in Oregon and now they are all over the world. They actually advertise there properties all over the place. No stone is unturned for them. We actually found our Vacasa house on Airbnb. Vacasa actually advertises their properties on Airbnb and other property rental websites. You would think they are competitors but ovisouly they have some sort of deal worked out. It does not really matter to me because you still get the same price whether you find it on their website or a third party website they are advertising on.
The price we paid was fair and since we were able to share it with a few other people it was actually really affordable. We were also able to bring our dog because it was advertised as dog friendly. The description and pictures were spot on. Of course they make it sound like it is the best place on earth because that is what they are supposed to do but everything was as advertised.
Their communication up too the rental date was awesome. I got multiple e-mails reminding me about the times and dates of our rental and how to get into the place. We also got multiple e-mails about how much it would cost if we wanted to check out late. One nice thing that happened was we got an e-mail the day we were arriving saying that the place was going to be ready a few hours early and we could go ahead and check in at no extra charge. Never had to talk to anyone on the phone. It was all over e-mail which is nice for everyone.
The only hiccup we had was when we arrived we had no power in the upstairs and we did not have access to the breaker box. Those type of problems are normal so we weren’t mad or anything. All we had to do was call a phone number Vacasa gave us and they had someone there in 30 minutes to fix the problem. It was really simple and painless.
Overall I had a really good experience and will be using them again in the future. The communication up to the arrival date was amazingly good which is what I really liked.
I like how we are starting to get different options of renting places from. I rented through VRBO and Homeaway in the past and have had really good experiences with them with no complaints. In reality most of these online rental sites are basically the same but you just get different inventory with different sites and Vacase really impressed me. They are definitely going to continue to be a player in the online rental game.`