Today Beyond Pricing announced that it has acquired Blizzard Internet Marketing’s website design, hosting, and booking engine business from RedAwning for an undisclosed sum.
According to Beyond Pricing, the acquired assets, people, contracts, and business will continue to operate under the Blizzard brand. In addition, Beyond Pricing has rehired four Blizzard employees whom RedAwning laid off in March: Nicki Polen, Lynn Singer, Greg Chavez, and Tish Lockard. “These four individuals have been with Blizzard for years and bring with them strong customer relationships and incredible know-how. We are thrilled to have them as part of the Beyond Pricing team, and we’re looking forward to reconnecting each of them to the Blizzard customers.”
For Blizzard’s existing marketing services customers, SEO, PPC, and email marketing services will remain under the RedAwning umbrella.
“Recent events have led to a renewed interest in booking direct and for good reason—both customers and property managers win when they can skip OTAs,” said Beyond Pricing cofounder and CEO David Kelso. “But to replicate the experience, property managers need accurate real-time pricing and availability on their website. With Blizzard’s world class booking engine and Beyond Pricing’s unrivaled dynamic pricing, our customers will have a platform perfectly built to bring guests from the OTAs.”
As part of the agreement, Beyond Pricing will integrate Blizzard Marketing’s suite of vacation rental technologies into its current pricing, analytics, and channel management portfolio to further strengthen the company’s position as the leading provider of revenue management tools to vacation rental industry professionals.
“Each of Blizzard’s hosted websites are included in this deal. As such, we will be the hosting provider for Blizzard’s entire website and booking engine customer base,” said Kam Bain, Beyond Pricing’s director of strategy. “Currently, our focus is on ensuring the Blizzard customers’ website design and booking engine needs are met and exceeded. For those customers who have also worked with Blizzard to fulfill marketing services needs, those customers will be able to have those needs met by RedAwning.”
“We at Beyond Pricing have always focused on doing what it takes to help vacation rental property managers succeed,” Bain added. “A big part of that is effective revenue optimization and management through dynamic and responsive pricing, and now, enabling PMs to keep more of their hard-earned revenue through direct booking websites.”
Beyond Pricing will immediately begin to support existing Blizzard Marketing customers using Blizzard’s booking engine, hosting and design services. Existing API agreements with property management software platforms will be intact with the acquisition. “We understand the critical need to have a property managers website connected directly to their PMS, and as such, we will be bringing those API integrations and partnerships over to Beyond Pricing,”
Founded in 1997, Blizzard Internet Marketing was purchased by RedAwning in May 2018 shortly after it announced a $40 million raise in funding. At the time, RedAwning CEO Tim Choate said about the acquisition, “For the past year, RedAwning has been working on marketing solutions that will further support our managers’ marketing efforts. We are about to unroll a few new website and marketing services of our own—watch this space—and Blizzard’s established expertise and services in internet marketing expand our end-to end marketing solutions even further, faster.”
In Spetember 2019, Beyond Pricing announced a $42 million Series A investment round led by Bessemer.
Existing Blizzard customers are encouraged to email blizzard@beyondpricing.com with any questions.
Em
June 28, 2020 at 8:28 pm
Hi team, great article and great companies – how exciting this acquisition! Small spelling mistake in the sentence before the last sentence. 🙂 Cheers, Em (“In Spetember 2019 (…)”).