About Us


Who we are

Search and Stay offers a wonderful selection of holiday properties, vacation accommodation and short-term rentals around the world.

With no large commissions or huge booking fees to pay at Search and Stay, we're owner-friendly and guest-focused. We put holiday rental owners and holidaying guests before shareholders and profit margins. Book your happier holiday today on Search and Stay.

Your limited holiday time is extremely precious, book your perfect holiday home with Search and Stay.

Choose one of our listed vacation properties for a family holiday, a couple's escape or a getaway for a group of friends. On Search and Stay you'll find the ideal holiday property.

Looking for a beach escape, trip to the bush, city shopping trip, food and wine tour, girls' getaway, a buck’s weekend, babymoon, honeymoon or just a relaxing family holiday, book with Search and Stay the perfect property and destination for your group or family.

Whether a lake house, winery accommodation, luxury escape, family holiday cabin, farm stays, bush trips, exclusive beach homes, waterfront boathouse, beach shack, city apartment, villa, lodge, houseboats, converted caravan, condo or a cosy cottage, your vacation rental will be just what you ordered.

We are an international property booking platform with holiday rentals for every adventure.

Search and Stay, a happier way.

If you're a holiday rental owner and would like to list on Search and Stay, contact us now.

Learn more about our story, The Search and Stay story

Search and Stay, a happier way

About Search and Stay for owners

Where did the idea for Search and Stay come from?

While a holiday rental listing platform, is not a new concept, Search and Stay was born out of the need for a holiday rental listing platform that put owners first but still considered the needs of the guests.

The business founders are Australian holiday property owners with a few rental properties. The impetus to start Search and Stay, came from wanting to reduce owner booking fees while having more control over property booking - how it was promoted, managed and who stayed as a guest.

Holiday rental sites can be expensive with commissions and pay-per-booking fees. These costs come out of owner profits or understandably, are added to the rates of their holiday home, inflating the rental cost for guests. Search and Stay is designed to make holiday rental easier and fairer for holiday home owners and their guests.

What does Search and Stay offer holiday home owners?

Listing on Search and Stay is the same as taking a direct booking, we want to make it fairer and cheaper for owners to promote and rent their holiday properties online.

It’s easy and free to list and all the features you’d need are included, eg 

  • rates and season management, 
  • extra charges, 
  • booking and reservation management, 
  • guest communication 
  • owner portal and reporting system
  • integrated free calendar dashboard
  • OTA Channel Manager (fees apply)

We also include features like a choice of ‘booking request’ or ‘instant booking’ depending on what owners prefer. 

It’s pretty simple to upload your property details and list, it’s also up within a few minutes ready for bookings. When you receive a booking you will be paid your full rental amount plus any of your fees and charges, on guest check-in.

What other benefits does Search and Stay provide holiday home owners?

Holiday rental property owners only have two choices for managing their holiday property:

·     Use a professional real estate agent or holiday property manager and pay management fees

·     Self-manage and maintain control

 And two choices for advertising their holiday property

·     Use a booking site and pay commissions & booking fees

·     Self-promote and save costs

Anyone who has managed their own holiday rental knows it’s an enormous amount of work – cleaning, supplying linen and maintaining their holiday property, decorating their holiday house and providing information, inspiration and support to guests to create a great holiday guest experience.

Whether you chose to self-manage or not is usually based on time, costs and sometimes where you live and where your holiday house is located.  

One benefit of managing your own property is more control over when, how and to whom your home is booked. It gives you the freedom to choose the guests' age and suitability, in a way that is often not done by a managing agent and is even frowned upon by some large booking platforms.

When marketing or promoting your holiday property to guests you have two options, you can either set up a simple website for your property for direct bookings (via email or phone) and promote on free sites, like Facebook and Gumtree or you can use one or more of the huge holiday rental listing platforms. In order to get enough bookings for your property, you really don’t have much choice.

Is Search and Stay just better for holiday home owners?

When building Search and Stay, the founders wanted to give owners more choice and reduce (actually remove) costs to take bookings and reduce costs to guests by charging a very small booking fee.

If Search and Stay is new, how can it be the same as the big sites? 

Three years in development – from inception to completion – an online holiday rental booking system is a very complex system. It is not like an online shop or even a real estate site.

The Search and Stay platform offers all that the other high-performing sites do like listing, booking, rates, seasonal rate and conditional changes, amenities, inclusion, accounting and financial integration, and owner and guest communication and with the extra care of features for owners like a choice between ‘direct book’ and ‘booking request’ and all no cost to the owner and with a minimal cost to the guest.

Search and Stay believe it's important to offer more owner support, so has a team of (human and Australian based) content managers who can help owners upload their individual properties or in bulk for agents and professionals.

How did Search and Stay know which tools & benefits owners would need?

Search and Stay is owned by holiday home owners who know exactly what is needed. The platform was built making sure all the tools and benefits to the owner were included – easy property listing and booking and calendar management with integration to calendars from other platforms, direct payment on check-in and customer communication. The Search and Stay platform offers all the tools that owners need without the cost.

Why wouldn't holiday home owners just use their own site?

It is always a good idea to build a site for your holiday rental property and take direct bookings. In addition, most self-managing owners are very happy to list on an Australian site that costs them nothing. Search and Stay now gives owners the choice to list and book for no cost and gives owners the freedom to set their own, rates, charges, seasons and whether they have a direct booking or take a booking request, but it's a big ask for owners to put all their eggs in one basket.

One benefit to having your property managed by a professional is access to a channel manager. A channel manager is an important distribution tool for holiday rental owners, it sends property details from one portal across multiple online platforms like Airbnb, Booking.com, VRBO, Stayz and TripAdvisor networks. It also integrates booking calendars to avoid double booking. But channel managers are generally only accessible to agents and professional holiday rental managers as you need at least 20 properties to start.

After offering all the tools, Search and Stay wanted to give individual owners the same options they get through professional managers, so they entered a partnership with short-term rental channel management solution Rentals United.

Through integration with Rentals United, we can now offer our Search and Stay Channel Manager to everyone from 1 to 1000 holiday properties.  Search and Stay connects to more than 60 other sites and owners now have choices, whether they use a professional manager or not.


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