New Search Engine Focuses on Hawaii Vacation Rentals
The following is the text of a press release for HawaiiGaga.Com, a new search engine that focuses exclusively on Hawaii vacation rentals. I poked around in it a bit and liked what I saw. Give it a try and let us know what you think.
Pretorius & McGrath Ltd. today announced the opening of HawaiiGaga.com, the world’s first search engine designed specifically for Hawaii vacation rentals. By making it easy for vacationers to discover all of Hawaii’s vacation properties, the company believes it can stimulate the rental industry and Hawaii tourism in general.
Hawaii’s vacation rentals are scattered across thousands of web sites. Most properties are listed in multiple locations but often don’t include a name or unit number, making them difficult to identify. Rentals can be listed by both agents and owners but not always at the same price. For vacationers, searching and sifting through all the choices is a daunting and time consuming task. HawaiiGaga.com finds, organizes, and catalogs Hawaii’s vacation rentals, indexing only the single most relevant source for each property.
To assist with vacation planning the web site showcases Hawaii’s natural attractions with hundreds of panoramic photos. Interactive maps show the location of rentals relative to Hawaii’s best attractions. Guides and articles, including a guide to Hawaii’s Top Beaches, further aid tourists in discovering Hawaii.
HawaiiGaga.com also hosts discussion forums and allows users to write rental reviews. For the first time an independent web site will collect reviews of Hawaii’s individual condo units as well as vacation homes.
CEO James Pretorius believes HawaiiGaga.com represents the future of search engines: “A search engine that services a small niche can be customized to suit the information it deals with - from the way it organizes data, to the way people interact with it. The end result is a better user experience, where search results are always relevant and people can easily find the information they’re looking for.” HawaiiGaga.com features many search tools to help people find rentals that match their preference. Search results are presented in a unique style that includes property photos, allowing vacationers to quickly shortlist rentals of interest.
For more information about HawaiiGaga.com, visit http://www.HawaiiGaga.com
Yeah - I saw that PR as well. I poked around too. The interface is better than VRBO, but still didn’t do everything I would be looking for. Even though you enter the dates you want to go….you still have to check availability. That stinks and is one of my biggest VRBO pet peeves.
The site looks pretty though.
Thanks Sheila, I noticed when the “check vacancy” button was checked it reduced the number of results. Assumed it was just showing me the properties available for my dates. After looking a little further this evening I see it was still showing me some properties that were not available on the dates I requested.
I also noticed that every calendar I looked at was from VRBO. I wonder if they’re just searching VRBO?
Also noticed that it returned no condos for Maalaea, so it appears they only have Maui partially entered.
I’m wondering if their “search engine” is just someone building a directory of VRBO listings.
David
Hmmm…I hope they can get some of those kinks worked out. They should have enlisted you and me to test it out before going live.
Hi Dave and Sheila,
It’s always interesting to hear sincere comments and get feedback. Thanks. I can address some of the questions/comments:
We had a kink in our availability calendar searching which I think has now been resolved now. I agree with your sentiments about availability searching. Currently about 50% of Hawaii’s rentals have availability calendars. We hope we can convince owners to publish availability, it’s very inconvenient when you have to contact them for information. (Properties with calendars rank higher in our search results).
There are many different formats for calendars and writing the software to figure them out is difficult. Thankfully many people use rentors.org (they are owned by vrbo hence vrbo listings utilize them, but anyone can use rentors.org for free).
Vrbo is the world’s biggest rental network and so HawaiiGaga.com’s search results reflect that. But HawaiiGaga.com also references thousands of rentals that are not listed on vrbo.
Yes, Maalaea has not been indexed yet. Unfortunately Maui was assigned the lowest priority because of the new licensing enforcement. And then we had deadlines that had to be adhered to and the site went live. Molokai is also not indexed yet. The good news is we will catch up in the next couple months. I can assure you we’re committed to having a comprehensive and high quality index.
We welcome suggestions on how we can improve things. Please let us know.
Thanks,
Cathy
HawaiiGaga.com
p.s.
Don’t forget about the site’s other features like our interactive maps!
[…] Hawaii vacation rental search engine, HawaiiGaga and on David’s blog, there’s a good discussion about it. Check it out and tell us what you […]
Cathy,
Thanks for the update and explaination.
David