HomeToGo Buys E-Domizil for $45 Million In Homes Strategy Shift

HomeToGo is acquiring vacation rental booking site e-domizil for about $45 million (40 million euros) to accelerate its shift toward a marketplace strategy that may end up working for holiday homes, but has failed elsewhere in online travel.

Founded in 2014 as a vacation rental metasearch or holiday home comparison-shopping business that sends site visitors to third-party partners to finish making their reservations, Berlin-based HomeToGo has been moving toward a hybrid model combining what it calls "onsite" bookings and offsite metasearch referrals to partner sites over the past few years.

Co-founder and CEO Patrick Andrae said during HomeToGo's fourth quarter and full-year 2021 earnings announcement Thursday that the acquisition of e-domizil, which is based in Frankfurt, will accelerate HomeToGo's onsite strategy. That's the model fully in use by e-domizil, which has some direct relationships with holiday home property managers that HomeToGo doesn't have, and would fuel the latter's European expansion.

E-domizil, with some 100 employees, was already a HomeToGo partner so the 370,000 holiday home listings e-domizil offers on its websites won't appreciably bolster the HomeToGo inventory stockpile, but the $22.3 million (20 million euros) in booking revenue that e-domizil generated in 2021 would expand HomeToGo's topl