The Vacation Rental Search Engine

Over 460,000 Home Listings

Where do you want to go?

What is Otalo?

Otalo is a vacation rental search engine. Save time and search all the vacation home rental sites at once (like Google, but for vacation rentals).

It's easy to use - just enter what you're looking for once, and let Otalo search all the different rental sites for you. You can save your favorite rental homes from all the different sites in one central place and share your list with friends and folks with whom you're planning your vacation. Even if you're not actively planning a vacation, you can just browse the world, looking at all the cool homes in exciting places.

We built Otalo when we found ourselves at our local cafe complaining about how *many* different sites we had to browse to find a vacation home rental - each making us re-enter our info each time - and no central place to save our favorites (We ended up going to a hotel). There didn't seem to be a search engine that would search all these sites for us - a Google for vacation home sites. We had a good amount of caffeine coursing through us and figured, "hey, let's build one!"

And thus Otalo - The Vacation Home Search Engine. Lots of work and fun have gone into making vacation planning just a wee bit easier. It's an awesome way to search all those rental sites for the perfect vacation home rental (and save loads over a vacation hotel!). So check it out and enjoy!

How do I pronounce that? What's it mean?

ō · tal · ō   We derived the name Otalo, after deep and long market research (ie. gabbing with the regulars of our local cafe, Rao's - Otalo HQ) by combining the Zen symbol enzo - "O" - with the Finnish word for house - "talo". Yes, after our usual too many cups of coffee, we figured we'd bring a Zen calmness to looking for a Finnish rental house. Well, any house. It was *so* obvious. Well, you get the idea.

The Property Listings

We are a search engine, and just like Google or Yahoo, we crawl the web with our OtaloBot (more info below) constantly searching for vacation home rentals. Our search engine consolidates duplicate vacation homes found at different sites (we tell you all the sites we found the home on), we also eliminate hotels, B&Bs, etc. so you can focus just on vacation home rentals.

Are you a Property Owner?

As a search engine, we don't take direct listings, we search through vacation home websites on the web. Your home will get included in our search index if you are listed on one of the vacation home websites we search. Here are some of our favorites:

Do You run a Vacation Rental Website?

Our goal is the put more renters into your vacation homes.

We would love to include your website in our search index! There are no fees or costs involved. We send highly qualified renters directly to your website for bookings and information. We display all properties fairly and randomly (as any search engine should). We do not allow other search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) to index any individual properties on Otalo, so your SEO will not be diluted. In fact your SEO will be enhanced as we link directly to your site from our location pages. Best of all, we send property owners who are looking to advertise/list their property to you (we don't take direct listings).

You can add your website to our crawler by clicking here. Please include the URL of your site. We can include you in our normal crawl, or we will take an XML feed. An XML feed will give you complete control over the quality and timeliness of your properties in our index. Click here for more information about providing us a Feed.

Every property in Otalo has an equal chance at being #1 for a given search. We don't force property owners or listing sites to pay for higher rankings. Our goal is to provide each and every renter the best match of vacation homes for their needs. Every listing on Otalo has an equal chance at gaining top placement in its search.

OtaloBot

Our OtaloBot crawls the web constantly searching for vacation home rentals. Our bot adheres to all the standards set in robots.txt as well as any nofollow links. You'll know that we visited your site if you see our user agent, "OtaloBot" in your log [Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; OtaloBot/1.0; http://www.otalo.com/bot.jsp)].

We work hard to make our crawling process polite and impact-free. We will never have more than two requests open on a single site (typically only one). We will always pause between requests, in scale with the previous response time from the server being crawled (so if the server gets slower, our bot will slow down as well). We also run very targeted crawls and do our best to only crawl pages which contain vacation listings. If a sitemap is available, and links to property listings, we will use it. If you feel that we can improve on our crawling process, please contact us.

If your site is being included in our search index and you do not want it to be, we would be happy to remove your site from our index. Please follow the procedures for submitting a takedown notice in our legal section

Advertising

Advertise with us, you'll love all the attention you get! We attract a great audience and have opportunities for text and image advertising units on Otalo.com.

Audience

Our search engine attacts an audience that is affluent enough to rent a vacation home, has plans to travel to specific destinations, and most likely has a family. Our interactive tool gives vacationers a sticky place to search through vacation homes and track their favorites in a collaborative manner with friends and family members while researching their vacation plans. Otalo is a bustling, extensive hub for people planning their vacations.

Having just launched at the end of 2008, we are continually collecting the demographics of our audience. Otalo readers have one thing in mind: a vacation! Our readers share these attributes:

  • They are planning a vacation.
  • They are affluent enough to rent a vacation home.
  • They most likely have a family.
  • They will be visiting specific geographic locations.

Advertising Contact

We have opportunites for text and image advertising units and placements. If you are interested in advertising on Otalo.com, please email us at 'baer [at] otalo [dot] com'. Please tell us your name and email or phone number. Otalo will get back to you immediately and your ad can be online within minutes!

Sites We Love

We love simplicity, elegance, function and fun. Here are a few wonderful sites designed by our friends and colleagues that that share our values. Show them some love and check 'em out!

  • Roaring Forties Press

        A great series of travel books that let you see a city through the eyes of the artists and musicians that lived there long ago.

  • Please Bring It

        Finally! A simple sign-up sheet online.

  • Happn.in

        Use Twitter to get hip to the 411 in any city.

  • CookThink

        Makes us feel *so* much smarter in the Kitchen!

  • GroundCrew

        A revolutionary new mobile application.

  • Sweet Peas & Stilettos

        A resource guide for the modern mom.