If you've booked travel online in the last several years, you're likely at least familiar with vacation booking sites like VRBO, Airbnb and Viator. You can book an entire trip from lodgings, flights and tours online.
Gone are the days when your only options were hotel rooms or localized vacation home rental sites for specific areas. VRBO and Airbnb completely changed the game when it comes to how people book overnight travel, but are they one and the same? We have all the info on VRBO and Airbnb so you can make informed choices the next time you need to book online travel or experiences.
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Once you have your lodgings booked, fill up your itinerary with experiences and tours using the Viator app. We have the lowdown on what Viator offers and how to use the platform to find the best of the best wherever you happen to be heading.
In this article: Flipside Luggage 22” Carry-On (Red Stripes - The Kimberly), Away Carry-On Luggage and Virtuosa Hardside 21-Inch Carry-On Luggage
Airbnb, an online marketplace for short-term rentals and experiences, was founded in 2007. Active in over 150,000 cities and towns worldwide and boasting more than 8 million active listings globally, Airbnb has serious scope. If you're looking for a rental of any kind, including private rooms, shared spaces, tiny homes, treehouses, luxury villas, farm stays, beach condos or regular vacation rental homes, Airbnb probably has it. The platform tends to appeal to solo travelers, couples, younger people, families, digital nomads, budget travelers and those who enjoy staying in big cities or traveling internationally.
Pricing on Airbnb can vary a lot depending on the type of rental you are looking for. While some travelers think Airbnb tends to be less transparent with fees, it is more likely that it will have rental options with a budget-friendly per-night price available. It will also have options that are more exclusive and luxe if you are willing to pay.
The Airbnb app itself is extremely user-friendly and that's coming from someone who has used the platform several times in the last decade or so. Listings typically have tons of photos and detailed reviews making it easier to zero in on the perfect property for your purposes. You can search through listings or see the options laid out on a map to better gauge where each place is located. Make lists to save your favorite listings and receive suggestions from the app based on your previous searches and stays.
Overall, staying at an Airbnb could mean slightly more complicated guest rules for quiet hours, cleaning, parking and the check-in process, because the platform offers so many types of rentals, including shared spaces and rented rooms. If you're renting a property you have all to yourself, the rules are usually more straight-forward.
My family has used Airbnb for many years with our first foray into the app dating back to 2018 when we took our young children on a long trip to Italy. Over the course of those weeks, we stayed in five different Airbnb properties, with each experience exceeding our expectations. In the years since, we have used Airbnb to book condos and houses on beaches and in the mountains, as well as to visit our families who live out-of-state. We have never had issues with a host and appreciate the extensive reviews typically available on properties that have been rented out multiple times.
VRBO has been in business since 1995 and tends to cater to larger groups, including families. It offers more traditional rental options in that all of its listings are entire properties with no shared spaces or rented rooms allowed on the app. If you're looking for a more classic vacation experience or traveling with a big extended family, VRBO could be the better choice. The platform has over 2 million rentals worldwide, and again, they're all entire homes.
While pricing for VRBO can vary based on a rental's location and offerings, the platform only offers full homes, so its pricing generally is going to be higher than Airbnb, which offers shared spaces and rented rooms. But if a whole home is what you are looking for, each platform's pricing is pretty similar.
The VRBO app is about as user-friendly as Airbnb's, with both platforms showing "all in" pricing that includes fees so there are no surprises when you move through the menus to book your lodgings. VRBO also provides the option to search listings by map, just like Airbnb, and allows users to make lists of favorite properties to choose from.
With VRBO offering only entire homes, guest rules are more likely to be relaxed as there are fewer concerns about disturbing others in a space or the use of any shared amenities, such as a yard, pool, hot tub or fire pit. With a VRBO booking, everything the host allows access to should be for your party only, but of course, checking the fine print with any rental you book to be sure you understand the host's rules and expectations.
One aspect of booking with VRBO that travelers with specific needs might appreciate is the platform's incredibly detailed filtering through search. Airbnb only offers a few broad criteria, such as number of beds and baths, amenities, property type, host language spoken and a few others. VRBO, on the other hand, gets pretty nitty-gritty, allowing you to search not just by number of bedrooms or beds, but by types of beds. This was incredibly helpful in 2024 when we booked a large rental for our extended family over Thanksgiving. With our senior parents, one single sibling, other siblings with partners and kids and those kids being varying ages, knowing exactly the types of beds available was critical so we didn't end up without enough beds appropriate to our party's needs (no teen siblings being asked to share a bed and no grown adults stuck with a twin). This kind of detail is why we only searched for a house using VRBO rather than Airbnb for that trip.
Another feature that caused our family to start using VRBO more often in recent years is the platform's merger with popular travel site Expedia, which allows users to spend points earned on stays, flights or experiences. If you earn a large chunk of OneKeyCash, the reward system available on both VRBO and Expedia, you can use it for purchases on either platform. Book that big vacation house on VRBO and use the resulting OneKeyCash earned toward a flight or hotel stay on Expedia. We travel quite a bit and although we tend to use airline rewards to book our flights, we love earning OneKeyCash with our multiple VRBO rentals per year to put toward hotel stays for other trips. Traveling can get pricey quickly, so having a platform that rewards us for spending with it makes us want to be repeat customers.
That said, when we plan a trip to a big city or want a less traditional rental, Airbnb is our go-to. Its more unique and memorable stays are sometimes what we are looking for rather than the guarantee of a full home all to ourselves.
In the end, the platform you gravitate toward should depend largely on the type of trip you're taking, who you are traveling with and what your top priorities are for your lodgings. Both platforms offer an array of information and types of rentals, but for most situations, there will be a clear winner as far as which one makes the most sense. My advice? Download the apps for each service and perform searches so you can compare and contrast. Be sure to read the fine print on rentals for both platforms for particulars on cancellation policies, fees, parking information and other details that can make or break your vacation.
Once you've booked flights, lodgings and other forms of transport, it's time to set up your trip's full itinerary, including any tours or special places you want to visit. Whether you're trying to maximize time on a shorter trip or see it all over a period of weeks, it makes sense to explore travel experience apps that can help you narrow down the options and make the most of your trip, regardless of its length. Enter, Viator. The online travel marketplace offers tickets, tours, travel experiences and more across thousands of destinations. Whether you're looking for a tour guide to show you the sights for a day or to explore a specific museum or historical site, Viator has you covered.
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Viator allows users to search for experiences, tickets and tours by city, state, types of tour (walking tour, bus tour, wine tour, etc.), as well as narrowing down the search by spoken language of the guides, time of day, duration, user ratings and more. If you're looking for "skip the line" tickets to popular destinations but don't need a guide, it has that option. If you want a guide to personally take you all over the Vatican, it has that too. There are also historical and ghost tours in thousands of cities, which is the way I used the app most recently. When traveling in New Orleans last year, my husband and I took a walking ghost tour booked through Viator and the experience was excellent. Our guide was incredibly knowledgeable about New Orleans and made the evening fun and exciting. We read through a number of Viator reviews before selecting the tour company we ended up using, and found that information very helpful in making our decision.
Viator offers free cancellations and a full refund for most experiences if you cancel more than 24 hours in advance. There is also the option to reserve now and pay later for most bookings, giving you the ability to lock in your favorites without having to part with your money right away. The platform also has a rewards program allowing travelers to earn Viator Rewards with every booking that can be used for future experiences.
As Viator is an aggregator for third-party touring companies, the pricing and offerings are varied. You can find more expensive private tours, as well as more economical group tours or bus tours. The biggest reason to use Viator, in my opinion, is how easy it is to see so many options at once, along with reviews. Before discovering Viator, I would use local companies to book excursions or buy tickets wherever we were going, causing me to have to pluck through my emails to locate confirmations and digital tickets before embarking on our trip. The Viator app makes it much more seamless to keep all of our experience bookings in a single place, including the tickets we need to access those events. I highly recommend using this platform to help shape our itinerary and make the most of your time in each place you visit. Use the app's reviews to be sure you are getting what you want and feel free to leave reviews of your own to help other travelers.
Flipside Luggage 22” Carry-On (Red Stripes - The Kimberly)
This carry-on has a divider that can help you keep the clean from the dirty, saving you future laundry after a long trip. In the default position, the divider fits neatly into the front of the suitcase, giving you the bag's full capacity for your clean clothes at the start of your trip. That divider can be expanded to allow up to 61% of the suitcase's space for the storage of dirty clothes. When fully expanded, the divider can hold all of your dirty clothes in the rear compartment.
Away is a viral brand known for its sleek design and amazing functionality. Users love how easily its 360-degree wheels spin along as you make your way through airports, while the inside keeps you organized thanks to its patented compression pad system and interior pockets. It also has a laundry bag. This carry-on is available in several stylish colors.
Virtuosa Hardside 21-Inch Carry-On Luggage
With its Right Height handle that allows for adjustment by 1-inch increments, the Virtuosa Hardside is comfortable to maneuver for people of any height. It has high-performance, 360-degree spinner wheels to help navigate crowded, tight spaces and an interior to die for. It boasts a zippered storage compartment, a dedicated WetPak pocket to stash wet clothing or toiletries you're concerned may leak, and compression straps that adjust so your belongings won't shift while you travel. It's available in four sophisticated colors sure to level up your travel fashion game.
Travelpro Platinum Elite Softside Expandable Carry-On Luggage
This carry-on features external USB A and C ports with a dedicated power bank pocket (power bank not included). The adjustable handle has a contoured grip for comfortable use and the suitcase has several external zipper pockets for stashing essentials, along with an interior storage system to keep essentials conveniently secure.
Prices listed reflect time and date of publication and are subject to change.
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