Vacation property management and tech company iTrip Vacations announced Tuesday that it has expanded its list of destinations to include new areas along Florida’s Treasure Coast.
The newly added iTrip properties are scattered across a handful of coastal Florida communities including Palm Beach Gardens, Fort Pierce, Juno Beach, Jupiter, Stuart, Hutchinson Island and Port St. Lucie. The properties will be operated as part of a new iTrip franchise, dubbed iTrip Vacations Treasure Coast. Travis and Karin Burton own and manage iTrip Vacations Treasure Coast.
“We look forward to providing the best experience to both homeowners and vacation guests by using the proven iTrip Vacations system,” Travis Burton said Tuesday in a statement.
Founded in 2008, iTrip Vacations is a company that operates rentals in 60 locations across North America. The rentals are locally owned and managed — with managers handling things like cleaning and inspections — while iTrip Vacations provides support services that include marketing, search engine optimizations (SEO), software and other technology.
Each property, for example, has a custom website that would-be guests can use to make bookings, while at the same time iTrip Vacations promotes its rentals on third party sites such as Airbnb, HomeAway, TripAdvisor and others. It further operates its own rental search and booking portal at itrip.net.
Additionally, Tennessee-based iTrip Vacations offers franchise opportunities for local managers, such as Travis and Karin Burton in Florida. The company bills its franchise service as a chance to “own a business in paradise,” and says that it is the “the largest franchise brand serving the full-service vacation rental industry in North America.”
The expansion of iTrip Vacations into Florida’s Treasure Coast comes amid a period of growth and intensifying competition among vacation rental management companies.
Airbnb is the 800-pound gorilla of the sector, with a size and reach that has upended both the travel and real estate industries. It is quickly becoming the Zillow of the space — the main portal and place online that consumers and property owners must interface with if they want to maximize their options.
But many other companies are racing to fill other niches, sometimes complimentary to Airbnb, other times competing with it.
Vacasa, for example, manages both vacation rentals and entire communities, and has diversified itself by branching out into adjacent sectors such as interior design. Hotel stalwart Marriott is also reportedly expanding into vacation rentals in response to the growth of Airbnb.
Other companies operating in the vacation rental sector include Expedia-owned Homeaway and Home Away’s VRBO.
The company also appears to be bullish regarding the growth of the industry. In a statement Tuesday, company co-founder Steve Presley said that iTrip Vacations plans to continue “leading the short-term property management industry” by “building new software features that will further enhance our artificial intelligence capabilities.”
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