Articles tagged “homeaway”

Gogobot is a small factor today in competing with category leader TripAdvisor on the reviews' front, but the HomeAway partnership will enable it to increase its profile on the back of HomeAway's global footprint.

It's smart for HomeAway to give its users more reasons to use its mobile app to improve their local experience with rides, food, and local attractions.

Not that HomeAway isn't above doing these sorts of things, but Airbnb's lobbyists sure were adept at getting a seat at the table in San Francisco.

It's a fascinating time in vacation rentals, and not just because of yesterday's news that HomeAway is suing San Francisco because of the law its city council let Airbnb write.

In the current M&A environment, HomeAway is both the pursued and the pursuer. And all of this takes place as HomeAway becomes an even more attractive acquisition target because it is getting aggressive and ahead of schedule, expecting a majority of its listings to be bookable online within two years.

The HomeAway-Expedia partnership is an important milestone for HomeAway, in particular, marking a new era of expanded distribution that starts with Expedia.com in the U.S., but will likely appear in other places, as well.

In the short term, we'll probably see a divide between the booking (Ostrovok.ru) and metasearch sites (Hipmunk) that will partner with Airbnb, and the more conservative ones that won't. The holdouts will eventually come around.

If the alternative lodging sector is still in its early days, then it is reasonable to envision that the market for services that help property owners and managers decipher the complexities of local rental taxes will only grow. HomeAway's investment in HotSpot Tax should burnish a hoped-for image of a vacation rental site that wants to ensure compliance with local laws.

How much emphasis will TripAdvisor really give to vacation rentals in the short term. It is already preoccupied with hotel metasearch and now restaurants. Can it do vacation rentals really well at the same time?