Holiday Lettings, the vacation rental brand owned by TripAdvisor, has struck off more 2,100 properties from its system this year for bad service.
The company says 1% of its total portfolio of rental properties have been "deactivated" for a number of reasons, including those that try to take a booking with a customer away from the Holiday Lettings website.
Property owners that do not engage with potential customers and other activities deemed to be offering a "poor service" are also under scrutiny and could find themselves turfed off the site as a result.
Holiday Lettings also says it will be rewarding the "most responsive" property owners with better rankings in search results, also to those that consistently offer online payment to guests.
Whilst the move (Holiday Lettings calls it a "campaign") is in-part designed to protect guests by offering financial protection if bookings and payments are made on the site, behind the scenes it also solves an ongoing problem for listing services across the travel sector.
Many travel service providers use a directory to capture potential customers and then secure bookings privately to avoid paying a commission to the intermediary.
Holiday Lettings says customer reviews left against properties on the site (similar to those on the mothership brand, TripAdvisor) are not taken into consideration as part of the deactivation project.
NB:Holiday rental image via Shutterstock.