The amount of information you can post on most vacation rental hosting site is limited to a few photo’s and limited text. Do you have documents, links, photos, videos, virtual tours, or other media and information relating to your rental that you frequently share with your tenants? I do! I recently found a great service that will let you host information about your rental and share them with with prospective tenants. Its called DROPIO. 
As the web site puts it: “Use drop.io to simply take anything [photos, videos, voice notes, web links, emails, etc.] and add them to a completely private, online space called a ‘drop’ to share real-time by web, email, phone, fax, and more. Check out our ‘How To’ video.”
I have to agree with them. Its very simple and its FREE and there is even no registration required.
Each drop can have 100MB of information and you can have as many drops as you want. Once created, you can add to it in many ways including uploading files, emails, post links, fax, call and leave voice messages. Drops can be password protected, fax from them, and even host conference calls from a private conferencing number. You can view a short tutorial here http://drop.io/howto
What can you share? Here is just sampling of some of the things you can share to support your vacation rental:
- As many pictures as you want
- Video walkthrough, panoramic stiches
- Links to local activities
- Newspaper articles about your resort area
- Copies of Welcome Packages and other information
- Restaurant reviews
- Maps
- Driving Directions
One final word of caution, be sure to bookmark or write down your newly created drops. Since they don’t require any registration if you forget your drop name you may not be able to find it again.
This is a great idea! I have maps and also an event calendar that I like to share with renters. You never know when you can book your vacation home based on a an event like a big athletic race (marathon, triathlon, etc), a popular festival, etc.
The solution I use is DropBox. While it has a slightly different feature-set, it also allows you to share files with anyone (for free).
You can install DropBox on Windows, Mac, & Linux, so there’s nothing to upload in a browser (although the do have a web interface too). Just copy the files to your “dropbox” folder and it takes care of securely uploading the files. If you want to share the files with the public, put the files in the “public dropbox” folder and send the user a link directly to the file (right-click the file to get the link).
It’s also great for sharing big files with other folks for work or personal reasons. With a 2GB limit, you can share an entire gallery of photos or that home movie easily.