Making good on its promise from last month, Choice Hotels confirmed that it will start offering vacation rentals.
Choice Hotels CEO Steve Joyce had hinted at the Americas Lodging Investment Summit that Choice would enter the sharing economy via partnerships with existing vacation rental management companies.
Today in an earnings call to discuss the fourth quarter of 2015, Joyce confirmed that within a month, three such vacation rental companies have already signed up with Choice — with “a pipeline of a lot of rental companies” behind them.
The shared rentals will be managed via SkyTouch technology, a cloud-based property management system, which Choice has significantly invested in over the past year and will continue to do so in this new capacity.
Joyce said SkyTouch will allow the rental management companies to “run their entire business in a professional, efficient manner.”
However, unlike Airbnb, guests won’t be interacting with Choice directly but rather with the vacation rental companies that Choice has partnered with. (Individual owners are not allowed.)
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