The Ultimate Airbnb Alternative Is Here

You finally requested your days off for vacation, agreed on a location with your friends, and started browsing Airbnb to find the ultimate rental—only to realize that everything in your budget is sold out. We’ve all been there: The struggle of finding the perfect option to stay at is real, but now, a new company is here to make that process easier than ever.

Working pretty much in the same way StreetEasy does for apartments, VacationRenter.com aggregates properties from across the web based on your dates of departure and arrival and region of choice from a variety of services, including well-known sites like Homeaway and Booking.com, along with independent boutique hotels and bed-and-breakfasts.

A quick search for the Hamptons the weekend of July 4 led to a number of great options, as did an Austin, Texas, search for September. Unlike other vacation rental services,Vacation Renter also includes hotel rooms as an option—affordable chains like Best Western and La Quinta showed up on occasion.

While the search feature was relatively easy to navigate, it did lose some points for not allowing users to put in the number of people per rental from the get go. Once you start scrolling through results, however, you can further customize your search by adding the number of guests, noting whether or not you want instant booking, setting a price range, or filtering by certain features that are mandatory to you (such as a pool or kitchen).

Phil Santoro, one of the cofounders, insists that the major selling point of the company is its convenience factor. “Digging through pages of irrelevant results when searching for a vacation rental remains a major pain point for travelers,” he told Fast Company. “Vacation Renter reads real-time signals to gauge user intent, providing the most personalized, relevant rental options for each search.”

One site that is not aggregated? Airbnb. But Vacation Renter could just give the booking site a run for its money as the go-to for travelers looking for something a little more personable than a hotel.

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