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HomeAway and Gogobot team up, create guides for vacation rental customers
DigitalHomeAway and VRBO vacation rental owners can now build local destination guides for their customers based on existing destination information from Gogobot users, as well as by adding their own tweaks and local favorites. Vacation rental customers can view these “Insider Guides” by going to a HomeAway.com and VRBO.com property listings, and selecting “Map.” Below [...]
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Why online vacation rental listings are still stuck in the past
DigitalLots of people think the lack of progress in being able to book vacation rentals online, as you would hotel rooms, is a technology problem, but it’s also an attitude problem. HomeAway, the vacation rental behemoth, had more than 742,000 paid listings of properties as of the end of March, and of these, fewer than [...]
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Analyst: HomeAway’s new business model could be big revenue boost
DigitalIn HomeAway’s current model, subscribers pay the company upfront for running its listings on its websites. Starting this summer, vacation rental owners can instead put up a rental listing for free and then pay HomeAway a percentage once the listing is booked. Property managers will be able to use the pay-per-booking service later this year. [...]
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Scammed vacation rental tourists start class action lawsuit against bank
RoomsAustralian holidaymakers are pursuing a class action lawsuit against Barclays Bank after hundreds of false accounts were used in an international travel scam…Over the past 18 months, tourists have wired millions of dollars into accounts with Barclays to pay for luxury accommodations…around the world. The vacations are booked through HomeAway and FlipKey, owned by TripAdvisor. [...]
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HomeAway makes its third move in Asia with tie-up to Singapore’s Travelmob
DigitalHaving already buddied up with China’s TuJia and Singapore-based Wego last year, today HomeAway has agreed another Asian tie-up – this time with Travelmob. As regular readers will recall, Travelmob is from Singapore and aims to be Asia’s Airbnb. HomeAway’s Victor Wang – from HQ in Austin, Texas – explains that this is part of [...]
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HomeAway CEO sees tough short-term rental laws as a “nuisance”
DigitalHomeAway may have initiated the formation of a coalition with Airbnb, TripAdvisor and Flipkey to fight restrictive short-term rental laws, but CEO Brian Sharples thinks municipal crackdowns are “more of a nuisance than a problem” for HomeAway. One reason is that owners and property managers renting their homes through HomeAway are primarily offering second-homes in traditional [...]
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HomeAway isn’t worried about Booking.com’s vacation rental challenge
DigitalThe largest hotel-booking company on earth, Booking.com, has been adding vacation rentals in Europe, but HomeAway CEO Brian Sharples seems unfazed by it, and in fact he’s learning some lessons from Booking.com’s practices. On the advertising front, HomeAway is in the midst of an about-face. The company that offered TV and digital advertisements for Super [...]
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How HomeAway’s CEO tapped into Kayak’s mobile “genius”
DigitalBrian Sharples, the co-founder and CEO of HomeAway, places his hands on the table, holding a tablet in one palm and pretending to clutch a smartphone in the other. “These are two different things,” Sharples says emphatically, as he explains that tablet users rent vacation homes through HomeAway almost at the same propensity as desktop [...]
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Video: HomeAway’s CEO on why Airbnb isn’t really competition
OriginalHomeAway CEO Brian Sharples appeared on Bloomberg television yesterday evening to discuss the vacation rental company’s new pricing model and six successful quarters as a public company. Sharples was at Bloomberg to describe how HomeAway is diversifying away from solely relying on subscription fees for listings by giving vacation homeowners the option of paying a [...]
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HomeAway will copy Airbnb and Booking.com for new initiatives
DigitalHomeAway will be shaking up its subscription-listing business for vacation rental owners by adding an Airbnb-like pay-per booking option later this Summer. The model will also become available for professional property managers later in 2013, and that could provide this biggest upside for the vacation rental company. Instead of paying a subscription for listing their [...]
