Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Homeaway acquires Abritel

Homeaway continues to grow, with American Capital investing an additional $75m to facilitate the acquisitions of the both VRBO and Abritel .

With more than 160,00 Vacation Rental properties listed, Homeaway is now the "800 pound gorilla" in the Vacation Rentals market.

Since formation, Homeaway has acquired most of the leading Vacation Rentals sites including CyberRentals.com, A1Vacations.com, GreatRentals.com, TripHomes.com, HolidayRentals.co.uk, HolidayRentals.fr and FeWo-direkt.de, as well as VBRO.com and abritel.fr.

With this amount of consolidation, is there any room left for the smaller Vacation Rentals sites?

Although the reach of Homeaway is definitely very large, many owners complain that their property gets lost among the huge numbers of similar vacation rentals. Hence, there's still plenty of room for niche sites that attract enough potential renters to cover the cost of listing.

If you want to research the varous options, we recommend you visit Compare Owner Holiday Rentals : they list more than 100 different sites, ranging from the large global sites to small, regional sites.

2 comments:

Dugdale said...

I have been studying HomeAway for the past year or so since they are in a related industry. I think they have been buying too much and need to slow down.

I like your blog, it reminds me of mine where I talk about my competition.

Keep writing!

carlg said...

I think I agree with this. I run two vr sites (Jersey Shore Rentals and Beach Rentals).

If I was an owner, I think I would rather post on a smaller site. I don't think it's worth all the money to appear at the bottom of the page.

The big boy's are eventually going to have to change something. Owners are going to start getting frustrated because they are a needle in a haystack.

Makes me sometimes wonder what the future of the VR portal business is?

Carl