Homeaway recently announced that it now has more than 1 million vacation rental listings! Furthermore, 320 thousand of these are e-commerce enabled, up 50% from a year ago. This is clearly good news for Homeaway, but is it good news for those who list their property on Homeaway sites?
First of all, it's important to note that Homeaway owns many sites and not just the flagship Homeaway branded site. Many people will be aware that it owns sites such as VRBO, Cyberrentals and Vacationrentals. However, over the last few years, Homeaway ( i.e. the WVR Group) has been acquiring more and more vacation rental sites. You can find a list of sites owned by Homeaway on COHR.
Because Homeaway owns so many sites, there may be some double-counting (e.g. if an owner lists separately on say, Homeaway.co.uk and VRBO), but even allowing for this, it's clear that Homeaway has a huge number of properties listed.
Some of the benefits of this are obvious. For example, Homeaway can invest in marketing to attract prospective renters, can invest in adding new features/capability and spread the cost over a much larger base. (Incidentally, Homeaway have just hired a new Chief Marketing Officer and plan to ramp up marketing plans, particularly in Europe.)
On the flip side, the primary concern of an owner would be that their particular property will get lost among all the other properties listed. This can be particularly true if your property is in a very popular area, where is may even make sense to pay for a premium listing in order to get noticed.
There are other things that can be done (e.g. the techniques on Improve Your Ranking on VRBO will work on many Homeaway sites) but at the end of the day, you may want to also list on some specialist non-Homeaway sites to balance things out.
However, (approximately) 1 million owners can't be wrong, so despite the concerns, for most of us, it makes sense to have a listing as part of the Homeaway network.
3 comments:
I used to advertise on Homeaway but the cost does not justify the returns I find as our home is in the very busy Disney World area. I would have to spend even more money to be visible. I therefore concentrate my advertising in Florida specific sites and any that give me extras like ability to showcase my VR360. My other strategy is to be as visible as possible on Facebook - both with our own Facebook page and in groups for the area. Homeaway has taken over sites that used to be good and made them less effective and they do not offer all the extras to Brits like myself - despite having a US bank account etc so we again become less able to be competitive. To me 1 million homes listed means that the chances of being found are so small. Search engines find the other sites so think carefully about the number of bookings that you need to pay for the listing - the representative from Homeaway told me - get one booking from them and that would pay for the listing- NO - I do not make that amount per booking I have running costs to come from that booking not just advertising. We have virtually nothing left for 2014, 2015 is filling up, bookings in place for 2016 and possible for 2017 - all without Homeaway.
This is rubbish. We have listed with several of the Home Away sites in the past, but results have never been as bad as this year. We are paying more to get poorer results, to the point that we will discontinue listing Homeaway and any of their sites.
I too have given up Homeaway (in my case Homelidays) for all the same reasons.
We all need to vote with our wallets, find or create regional/niche sites, and maybe the arrogant suits who are running (should I say ruining) our businesses will finally get the message. It is beyond shameful that they have swallowed up good sites which perfomed well for owners and guests alike and which each had their own individualities and their own followers, and turned them all into a horrible homogenous mess in search of an increase in their bottom line. If they had left well alone, bought up these sites and allowed them to continue working as they were, there would probably have been a brigher future for everyone, even if not quite so lucrative in the short term for them.
What really drives me to distraction about this is that the person who they now consider their customer (the traveller, that is, not us the owners) never said they wanted a site where they could find a million properties. Who on earth would want that as a traveller.
We are nothing more than inventory to them - pity they did not think to ask anyone (either traveller or owner) what they REALLY wanted. They have cooked the goose that laid the golden egg, commoditising a valuable, personally-based business and in many cases potentially destroying the pension income of thousands, possible tens of thousands, of small owners who have made significant investments in their properties.
Let's not delude ourselves - they will never care about the owners who provide the inventory
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