Articles tagged “homeaway”

When Huston took over as CEO of the Priceline Group 13 months ago, a financial analyst told us that Huston would play it safe and not make any bold moves in his first year at the helm because he needed to assure Wall Street about his leadership. Boy, was that analyst wrong.

The Priceline Group can acquire a restaurant reservations platform in OpenTable and add tons of vacation rentals to its Booking.com unit, but Expedia Inc. plans on sticking with its guns and focusing on the hotel business. Will that focus win out? Expedia certainly has been making strides, but this is still the beginning of the beginning.

Watching how Priceline Group, HomeAway, and Expedia interact in 2015 may turn out to be a very interesting look at a fascinating contact sport.

Many vacation rental owners are not going to be happy about HomeAway's online booking push -- but it is in the best interest of travelers and HomeAway's shareholders are going to back the move, as well.

It is interesting to see that the Travel Technology Association, which takes the online travel agency side on the hotel tax issue, is siding with members HomeAway and Airbnb on short-term rental legislation.

Always read the fine print.

There are holes in the arguments of both the City of San Francisco and HomeAway. The new short-term rental law would indeed put HomeAway in the new position of collecting taxes from renters, and HomeAway could find a way in its business model to make that happen. Still, the new law does appear to favor Airbnb, which already collects fees from guests.

Airbnb's business model (3% commissions) is more host-friendly than HomeAway's (10% commissions). It's good news, except that it runs contrary to all the company's marketing messaging.

The sharing economy may breed a few small entrepreneurs, but it doesn't have much use for professionals. In this world, everyone is an independent contractor.

HomeAway made an opportunistic acquisition of the Glad to Have You app in March for nearly $16.8 million. That's a relatively tiny acquisition for HomeAway and fits nicely with its strategy to enhance the guest experience. That's especially true given the oversized valuations of potential acquisition targets around the world this year.