Holiday-makers with bookings on FlipKey, Holiday Lettings and Niumba were informed that reservations made for November 1, 2024 and beyond would be immediately canceled and refunded. This comes after TripAdvisor announced that it would be moving away from providing in-house accommodation booking services.
TripAdvisor operates a number of travel related companies including travel agencies, comparison shopping websites, and user-generated mobile app and website content. Short term rental (STR) brands like FlipKey, Holiday Lettings and Niumba were bought up by TripAdvisor in the early 2000s as part of their strategy to compete with other STRs like Airbnb and HomeAway (now branded as Vrbo under the Expedia umbrella).
TripAdvisor to leverage 3rd party booking sites
TripAdvisor hasn’t exactly been too vocal about the situation, catching many would-be vacationers off guard. It seems that rather than shutting down the division entirely, they will move towards advertising 3rd party options, similar to what they do on TripAdvisor’s main website.
In a statement to Short Term Rentalz, Trip Advisor said:
“Tripadvisor has decided to discontinue the direct booking and management of vacation rentals on its platform. This strategic shift aligns vacation rentals with our existing hotels offering and ensures the best experience for our customers.”
This does not exactly come as a surprise though as TripAdvisor has been trying to dump their in-house accommodation division since the start of 2020, citing that their combined revenues only accounted for 10% of the company’s income.
Guests and hosts received cancellation emails
Many guests booked on these platforms took to social media and other travel forums to express their frustrations with having to deal with news of the sudden cancellations. Here is a sample email sent to a guest booked on UK-based Holiday Lettings.
“We will no longer contract directly with homeowners or enable bookings on the Tripadvisor or Holiday Lettings platform.
“Soon we will disable the option for travellers to book stays with a check-out date beyond Oct 31, 2024.
“We are also cancelling all bookings scheduled to stay from Nov 1, 2024, and will be issuing full refunds to affected travellers.”
As mentioned above, there hasn’t been too much publicity on TripAdvisor’s site about the changes, but the company published this resource page to provide information to affected customers.
FlipKey, Holiday Lettings and associated sites no longer accepting direct bookings
A quick search on FlipKey for anything from November 1 and beyond results in an empty result, saying “Sorry we couldn’t find any results under your particular search criteria. Please edit your filters.” If you try a similar search on Holiday Lettings, all the results are from 3rd parties such as Vrbo.
What now?
TripAdvisor is still letting customers and hosts contact each other via the respective booking engines. They hope that this may provide an avenue for direct bookings, but as these potential transactions will be between the guest and host, TripAdvisor would bear no legal responsibility should any issues pop up.
“Any booking or arrangement you make with the owner is directly between you and the owner. None of the Tripadvisor Vacation Rental Companies will have any involvement with, or bear any responsibility for, such bookings or arrangements nor any issues that arise from them.”
Unfortunately this is not an ideal situation, and will still leave many guests either scrambling for alternative accommodations or cancelling their trips all together. Hosts are also feeling the heat as they’ve instantly lost all booking from November going forward. For those who relied solely on FlipKey, Holiday Lettings and Niumba, it comes as a big blow as some hosts chose these platforms specifically because of the cheaper service charges.
