Anyone have other sites they use besides VRBO and Airbnb to book a rental? The service fees are around $400 for the week we are looking which is crazy. Trying to find a place near Cedar Point.
Service fees vary. But have you looked for a deal staying right at Cedar Point’s own hotel, Hotel Breakers? We did it a few years back, and it was really nice. If you book early enough they sometimes have great deals.
Anyway…never tried to book a rental for Cedar Point because we are a two hour drive away, so usually a day trip for us.
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We did and we may end up just staying in a hotel. We have 4 families going so our initial plan was to book a big home, but a hotel may work out better in the end.
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I can’t say it always works, but I will type many combinations of search engine keywords. Very frequently you can find the exact same property listed on multiple platforms, including personally held ones. Many times I will find that the homeowners would preferred to deal more directly than through those big companies anyway. With that said, places with more houses will have more options. Sometimes owners don’t have to try that hard because renters don’t have a lot of options.
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http://sanduskyvacationrentals.com/
Have you already dug around the site? You may be able to communicate directly with the owners and see if they will work with you. Just a thought. I have used backdoor routes to rent houses.
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I did. We just booked a rental about an hour ago.
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Oh. I missed that you’d found one. 
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This was going to be my suggestion. Saved $250 last trip. I used to love VRBO but the fees have gotten out of hand. The past place we stayed the same property was listed on Evolve. It was called wild wind. I just put that in a search engine with the city and it came up with a few different places the property was listed, all with different total prices.
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One of the recent properties we found and via VRBO, the property owner offered to let us book outside the VRBO system for cheaper…however, their rental agreement outside of VRBO did not protect us nearly as well, such as a cancellation policy that would allow them to keep most of the cost even 60 days out, where through VRBO it was free cancellation up to 30 days out. So I paid a bit more and stuck with VRBO.
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Yeah, I don’t think I would totally cut out a 3rd party system but I found some that have lower service fees (VRBO sets these fees, not the owner). Evolve had the same cancelation policy as VRBO. We have been staying in hotels more lately but it’s just by chance rather than choice so I haven’t had a lot of opportunities to seek out the different rental sites and compare.
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Yea. Always need to read it all carefully. 
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