UPDATE: HomeAway's systems just came back up after about a full hour of being down, but please read the below. The point is still well made.
The entire HomeAway empire - all their websites, payment systems, administrative panels - are down right now, and they've been down for a long time. You can't get to any of it.
This is why it's really REALLY good to not put all your eggs in one advertising/payment basket. Particularly when that company isn't a software company but an advertising company.
Long unannounced down-times like this are unacceptable for a company of HomeAway's size and position. Even if it were announced, it's too long to be acceptable. (And we're quite sure this wasn't planned.) HomeAway has almost 2,000 employees of which many dozens or hundreds are engineers. They should be prepared for contingencies with offsite servers ready to go online and read-only snapshots prepared.
Here at OwnerRez, we have watched HomeAway flounder, from a engineering perspective, for a long time. They have asked the entire vacation rental industry to put their trust (and all your properties, money, guests) into a system that is not supported by the type of software/engineering mindset that such a system needs.
Just ask yourself...
If you're using their "double blind" proxy email address, and you have a guest about to check-in, how do you communicate with that guest right this second or even an hour from now? What if that guest is trying to communicate with you??
Always use independent software to manage your vacation rentals, guests and payments. Always spread your advertising across different listing sites. And above all else, build your own website and brand and collect guest information (contact information) so that you can market and communicate with them directly.
Rant over.
