G2

Thom J.

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

11/27/2020

"Helping You so You Can Help Yourself"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Rentals United?

What I like best is the real reasons you would use RU as a platform channel manager; the ability to onboard to lots of large channels via one integrated calendar and the obvious benefit that you can scale your pricing to offset your commission rates. In the world of holiday rental, and the model of how agencies work, this protects margin and ultimately profitability. Ultimately, they help you to do the things you could never do manually. Giving us the tools and the flexibility to compete with larger agencies by giving us the power of the OTAs in a centralised system has been a move that has cemented our future, for the time being, allowing us to grow naturally, rather than pay to force growth that doesn't truly exist. We've also been on the receiving end of a lot of help from our account manager who will often make time for us if we have any issues. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Rentals United?

It's hard to say I dislike anything specifically. There are outages or sync issues which are annoying but these are hardly limited to just Rentals United. This is something that's always going to happen no matter what CM you use. I do wish there were more niche channels to work with, but this is not a fault of RU. Many niche channels don't work in LOS pricing, only nightly, so it's difficult in the UK climate, but luckily, the large OTAs all do, so it's not a major issue at all. The main downsides for us now would be the functionality differences between some of the channels. For example, Airbnb is very integrated and you can do most things there. It's also quick to connect. Expedia for example is less easy and tickets need to be raised in order to connect to their systems. Whilst we are told this is being worked on, and whilst this isn't just RU's issue to deal with, it does make for frustrating to have to do this each time you want to connect. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Rentals United:

Aside from being the largest channel manager in the world, therefore making it one of the safest options, this reputation has been earned IMHO. They have some of the best people working for them, and the attention of some of the largest booking platforms in the world. They won't make your life easy. They take away the barriers you will have to multi-channeling, but this still leaves you with the next steps of work to be done which they can only help with so much. This is not on them. It's on you to make it work from there on in. But if you're willing to do this, Rentals United will make your life a lot better.

Booking will start to come in and your business will benefit from this immensely. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Rentals United solving and how is that benefiting you?

We're solving the problems on behalf of our owners as well as ourselves. Being able to multi-channel saves our owners having to do this, and we can continue to provide more and more services to them. It also allows us to increase bookings as bigger audiences will yield more bookings, which is especially helpful in the low season when booking volumes rise substantially. We have around 700 listings, which if done manually would just be too much to administer, and that would be if you're choosing just one channel. Every time you added a channel, you would be adding another 700 manual listings. If we used the big five only, that would be 3,500 listings alone. It would not be tenable but with Rentals United, this is made possible. And it gives us so many other options. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.