How HomeAway's CEO tapped into Kayak's mobile "genius"
Skift Take
This is a big year for HomeAway: It is retooling its business model, and will attempt to get its mobile products in order. Good thing it has experts to lean on.
Brian 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 users, but potential guests wielding smartphones browse a lot, but hardly book at all.
He goes so far as to say that tablets almost shouldn't be considered mobile devices when it comes to vacation rentals because customer behavior on tablets so mirrors desktop behavior, while advanced booking of vacation rentals at this point may be too complex on incongruous
