Does anyone use an escrow service or similar for holiday rentals?

When booking your holiday with Thomsons, Airtours or the like, you have protection against the company going bust via ABTA . With the ever increasing use of the internet for private rentals, how do you show potential customers that their money is safe once paid? I was wondering if some sort of escrow service could be used, or is there some sort of insurance you can get?

How do other people work this?

Mark

More than anything else and in order to avoid all the most commun problems when renting in Spain, I would encourage you to submitt the contract to arbitration: as some of the many advantages of that:

1.   Faster: Conflicts are solved in a maximum period of 6 months.

2.  Cheaper: than judicial litigation..

3.  Eficcient in conflict resolution.

4.  Experts and professionals are in charge of the solution of the conflict.

5. Avoidance of future litigations.

Regarding insurances, a home insurance usually cover civil liabilities and damages on third parties.

I have still been thinking about ways to protect a customer's money and I think insurance backed guarantees will be too expensive and we are much too small to be ABTA bonded .

I did find a site called rentalsystems.com which is free to advertise on, offers you the obligatory calendar and potential for bookings through their sister company, but also payment processing which is cheaper than Paypal, which was one of the options I was going to use!! When the money is paid, it is paid to a clients account and held there in case of any problem, rather than being paid straight to us and the opportunity of a moonlight flit . They also positively encourage you to include their booking system on your webpages, something that other sites won't let you do. The only problem I can see with it is that payment is not made to us until the day after departure. I would rather it was banked in my account somewhere rather than earning interest for them.

Has anyone else used tis site please? Good or bad comments needed to evaluate.

Mark