An Austin-based startup you've never heard of is taking on Airbnb | Savvy Journal | Savvy
An Austin-based startup you've never heard of is taking on Airbnb
That's us, actually. Hi. Here's the whole story.
If you've opened the Airbnb app recently, you already know why we exist.
A studio you'd have paid $185 for two years ago now sits there at $312 a night. All in. No breakdown, no running total, nothing to argue with. Just a number that looks a lot like rent. You flip over to a hotel on the same dates and it comes in cheaper. So you close the tab, convinced the vacation rental deal is gone.
It isn't. It just moved. Same home, same dates, minus the markup. That's what Savvy does. Search your city and see the actual price.
Airbnb got expensive. The fees just moved behind the curtain.
Here's what happened. Airbnb and Vrbo got huge, got public, and spent a decade stacking fees on travelers. Then the FTC stepped in. The Junk Fees Rule took effect May 12, 2025, and called out short-term rentals by name. Mandatory fees had to show up upfront. A real win for transparency.
Then Airbnb made one more move. Between October and December 2025, it shifted to a single 15.5% host-only fee and started showing guests one all-in number instead of a checkout breakdown. The fees didn't disappear. They got absorbed into the nightly rate. Industry pricing tools openly told hosts to mark up their listed rates by around 18% to keep their payouts whole.
Which is how you end up looking at that $312-a-night studio and can't figure out what exactly you're paying for, only that it's more than it should be.
The math bears it out. According to a January 2026 Upgraded Points analysis, whole-unit Airbnbs are now more expensive than comparable hotels in 46 of 50 major U.S. cities. Los Angeles runs about $328 a night higher on Airbnb. In Orlando, fees and taxes make up over half the total cost of a stay.
Travelers have clocked it. An October 2025 Upgraded Points survey of more than 2,000 Americans found 61% now prefer hotels for domestic trips. 64% think hotels are cheaper. 76% say hotels are more transparent about pricing. "Hotel girlies won" is a real sentence people post on the internet now.
This isn't a vibe shift. It's a marketplace shift.
So who are we, and why Austin?
We're Savvy, a vacation rental marketplace based in Austin. We rebranded from bnbfinder on January 28, 2025, and our pitch is simple: professional property managers, transparent pricing, no guest service fees, a direct line to the host.
Our founder and CEO, Eric Goldreyer, has been in this industry for thirty years. He started BedandBreakfast.com in 1995 and sold it to HomeAway, now part of Vrbo, in 2010. He co-founded TurnKey Vacation Rentals, which sold to Vacasa in 2021. Then he took over bnbfinder in 2022 and rebuilt it into what you're looking at. His take, from the rebrand announcement: travel should be about the people you love, not worrying about being taken advantage of by big corporations tacking on service fees. We agree.
About Austin. In April 2025 we put a billboard outside of the Expedia Group building, which happens to be Vrbo's headquarters. It read: "Think of us as Airbnb and Vrbo's hotter, cooler, smarter, younger sibling that never has fees. Stay smarter." Business Insider covered it. Airbnb and Vrbo both declined to comment.
We figured the neighbors should know who moved in.
Direct booking is back
Savvy is a marketplace, not a big-tech middleman. The difference matters. When you book on Savvy, you're connected to a professional property manager who runs the listing as an actual business. Not a side hustle. Every manager on Savvy operates at least five properties and uses professional booking software, which means if your Bluetooth lock glitches at 11 p.m., a real person picks up the phone.
The industry calls this "book direct." It means skipping the big OTA middleman and reserving directly with the people who own and manage the stay. Lodgify's 2024 industry report found nearly two-thirds of hosts now rank direct bookings as a top goal for the year ahead. Guests win too: fewer fees, clearer policies, and a host who want to deliver exceptional hospitality.
We work with more than 2,500 professional property managers across the US, Canada, and Mexico. Over 150,000 listings and counting. We connect to the property management systems the pros actually use, including Track, Streamline, Guesty, Hostaway, and OwnerRez. So what you're browsing is the same inventory these managers run on their own sites. Just without the surcharge layered on top.
Does it actually save money?
Skift ran the test in January 2025. A four-bedroom home in Phoenix for six nights in early February: Airbnb came in at $2,889 before tax, including a $300 cleaning fee and a $357 guest service charge. Our partner, PHX Stays, came in at $2,616 all in. That's $273 back in your pocket.
An eight-bedroom place in Snowmass for the same dates: Airbnb was $25,391. We showed $16,018. A two-bedroom in South Beach Miami: Airbnb $10,589, Savvy $8,557.
Not every comparison swings that hard. Property managers set their own prices, and demand and promotions move the math around. But the pattern holds: same home, same dates, a smaller total than you'd see on Airbnb. Thousands of travelers have already saved millions this way on Savvy, and we're growing.
A few quick answers
Wait, is this legit? Yes. We only work with professional property managers who run at least five properties and use real booking software. Our CEO has been doing this specific thing since 1995.
What's the catch for me? No guest service fee. You pay the nightly rate, the cleaning fee the host sets, and taxes. That's the bill.
Why haven't I heard of you? Because we rebranded in January 2025 and we're a small team going up against companies with ten thousand times the marketing budget. The billboard was a start.
Where do you cover? Top markets include Austin, Nashville, Hilton Head, Destin, the Smoky Mountains, 30A and Rosemary Beach, Telluride, and Orlando. Plus a lot of the places in between.
Where to start
Pick a market you already had in mind. Compare a Savvy stay to the same property on Airbnb. Do the math yourself. That's the whole pitch, and it's the one we've been making, in one form or another, for three decades.
Travel should be about the trip. Not the fine print.
Your direct booking site works perfectly. For guests who already know you. Everyone else goes to Airbnb, not because it's better, but because until now, there was nowhere else to go. Here's what changes when you're not alone.
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