Otalo: The Business of Finding Just The Right Vacay Rental

Last August I was looking for a house to rent for two weeks in a pretty, very rural place. Over the course of three weeks I search until my ears bled on site after site after site, finding the same listings, incomplete info, and (I found out by making some calls) wildly inaccurate info as to "Allows pets" and other such criteria.

I wish I had known then about Otalo, the new search engine that aggregates the listings of lots of vacation rental sites into one easy to use search engine.

The tool allows you to search by location, number of bedrooms, max price, and whether the house allows pets, smoking and the like. You can also search specifically for concepts like "waterside."



The site is fast and the information extremely well organized. As it is new, the number of listings is modest so far -- only about 200,000 thus far. But as they add more sites to their search, I am sure that figure will grow considerably.What they have so far runs a broad gamut of amenity levels and pricing, which broadens its relevance to include virtually anyone considering a vacation rental.

News of Otalo is being received very positively. Here is part of what Michael Arrington had to say about the service on Tech Crunch:

...what the industry needed was a good central search engine for all those vacation home rentals. It’s also a pain to do lots of searches on different sites because you have to enter where and when you want to go, making it a lot more complicated that a standard search engine query.

That’s just what Otalo, which just launched, is doing. They are starting off with 200,000 listings. The company was founded by Michael Giles (the founder of Furl) and Baer Tierkel. The name Otalo comes from the Zen symbol enzo - “O” - with the Finnish word for house - “talo.”

Check out Otalo. It's pretty cool, and providing a really important service that has been largely underserved until its debut.

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