• News
    • VRM Intel News
    • Latest News
    • Sponsor News
  • COVID-19
  • Marketing
  • Tech
  • OTAs
  • Customer Service
  • Business
  • Housekeeping
  • More
    • Education
      • Calendar of Events
      • Videos & Whitepapers
    • VRM Intel Live!
    • Reports Login
    • VRM Intel Magazine
    • Subscribe
    • Advertise
    • Authors
    • About Us
    • Contact Us
VRM Intel
  • News
    • Resort Collection Outsources Call Center to Jamaica
    • Getaway Society Founders Are a Dynamic Duo
    • Marketers: Too Soon to Plan for 2022?
    • Fact or Fiction? Mythbusting Hot Vacation Rental Trends
    • Fast Growth at Homes & Villas by Marriott International
    • VRM Intel News
    • Latest News
    • Sponsor News
  • COVID-19
    • Bounce into 2021 with Tools to Help Heal and Focus
    • 12 Steps To Reclaiming Your Spirit of Hospitality From The Grasp Of Cynicism
    • Marketers: Too Soon to Plan for 2022?
    • Fact or Fiction? Mythbusting Hot Vacation Rental Trends
    • Identifying, Hiring, and Inspiring Your Team in a Post-Pandemic World
  • Marketing
    • One Size Doesn’t Fit All in Owner Acquisition
    • Marketers: Too Soon to Plan for 2022?
    • Fact or Fiction? Mythbusting Hot Vacation Rental Trends
    • Fast Growth at Homes & Villas by Marriott International
    • Expedia CEO Talks Vrbo: We ‘Removed Vrbo from Google’s Vacation Rental Meta Product’
  • Tech
    • Fact or Fiction? Mythbusting Hot Vacation Rental Trends
    • Technology in 2021 and Beyond: Vacation Rental Tech Leaders Predict the Future
    • The Pace Report Is Dead
    • How 2020 Played Out: Analyzing Performance in 10 Key Vacation Rental Destinations
    • Founder of Newly Launched Kaiser Vacation Rentals Says, “Things Will Be Different … This Time”
  • OTAs
    • Expedia CEO Talks Vrbo: We ‘Removed Vrbo from Google’s Vacation Rental Meta Product’
    • vacation rentals at the best price guaranteed
      Stays Group Vacation Rental Network Opens SoutheastStays
    • Vrbo Is Performing Better Than Airbnb for Vacation Rental Managers, But Direct Booking Still Number One Revenue Source . . . By A Lot
    • 4th Annual #BookDirect Guest Education Day Is February 3, 2021
    • Airbnb Goes Public. CEO Brian Chesky: “Travel is never going to look like it did in January”
  • Customer Service
    • Resort Collection Outsources Call Center to Jamaica
    • Bounce into 2021 with Tools to Help Heal and Focus
    • 12 Steps To Reclaiming Your Spirit of Hospitality From The Grasp Of Cynicism
    • Getaway Society Founders Are a Dynamic Duo
    • sarah and t record podcast vrma recap episode sarah walker luxury vacation rentals
      Sarah and T Podcast: PMs Should Be Prepared to Answer These Questions from Prospective Homeowners
  • Business
    • One Size Doesn’t Fit All in Owner Acquisition
    • Resort Collection Outsources Call Center to Jamaica
    • Bounce into 2021 with Tools to Help Heal and Focus
    • 12 Steps To Reclaiming Your Spirit of Hospitality From The Grasp Of Cynicism
    • Getaway Society Founders Are a Dynamic Duo
  • Housekeeping
    • Founder of Newly Launched Kaiser Vacation Rentals Says, “Things Will Be Different … This Time”
    • Booking.com Affirms Commitment to Quality with Minimum Cleanliness Score Requirement
    • Q&A with Breezeway founder Jeremy Gall about company’s $8 million funding round and more
    • Gatlinburg-based Cabins For YOU acquires Chalet Village and is looking for more. Q&A with owner and founder Greg Plimpton
    • What is the cost of Airbnb’s recommended 24- to 72-hour “buffer” time between stays?
  • More
    • Education
      • Calendar of Events
      • Videos & Whitepapers
    • VRM Intel Live!
    • Reports Login
    • VRM Intel Magazine
    • Subscribe
    • Advertise
    • Authors
    • About Us
    • Contact Us
  • RSS

OTAs

PM insight from HomeAway’s Third Quarter Earnings Call

PM insight from HomeAway’s Third Quarter Earnings Call
mm
VRM Intel Staff
November 5, 2014

In HomeAway’s Q3 earnings call yesterday, CEO Brian Sharples made comments and answered questions that give some insight into HomeAway’s plans for 2015 and beyond. Here are some of Sharples’s comments which impact professional property managers.

 

Overview

“We’ve made it very clear recently that we are placing emphasizes on a multi-year marketing strategy that much of our efforts focused on driving demand and efficiencies that increased bookings and saved time for our owners and managers. We’re also equally committed to elevating the traveler experience on our sites.”

 

Driving Online Booking

“The most impactful change we can make to enhance traveler experience is to drive adoption of online booking. And so I want to make it very clear that we have set a goal and it is our intention to require the vast majority of our listings to be online bookable by the end of 2016.”

 

“What this means is that travelers will see an online booking button will listing, know the calendar and rates are correct and have the option to send a booking request and be confident that they will receive a prompt response. It’s important for you understand what this means for our owners and managers, first, the online booking system will accommodate both subscription and PPB as we believe this flexibility gives us the competitive advantage in the marketplace.”

 

“These changes over the next two years will require that owners and managers maintain their calendars publish rates that accurately reflect all fees and respond the booking request as quickly as possible and within 24-hours certainly to be competitive on our sites. All of these items are important elements of listing quality and in the shorter term will be faced into our sort algorithm which determines where listings appear with sort order.”

 

“…We have, if you look at our new online booking metric, taken online bookings from 5% 12 months ago was 5.4% of our customers to 32.6% one year later today. So our objective of getting that to a 100%, we are actually arguably on pace to do that. I think we’re going to bend the curve up, because of some policies decisions and other things we’re doing. But we’re giving the customers enough of heads up that I actually don’t believe, we’ll see a lot of churn and I think the other reason is that where they are customers going to go, I mean Trip now (TripAdvisor), Airbnb now the most is the competitors are online booking based. There really aren’t any major sites that deliver the kind of traffic we do that don’t have that kind of an experience.”

 

“Our owners have resisted online booking historically. And even two years ago, when we surveyed our owners, 90 plus percent said they had no interest in online booking. And that’s because, our owners make tons of money and they are doing it in a certain way and they are happy doing it that way. But I think traveler expectations are changing in part, because of competition.”

 

Responsiveness Scores Will Be Visible to Guests

“Starting in the fourth quarter, we will also make responsiveness scores visible to travelers and while we’re aware that there may be some owners and managers who initially are uncomfortable with these changes, lack of response outdated calendars and confusion over rates creates poor traveler experience and is not consistent with the experience that we want to deliver and that we believe we have to deliver going forward in the future.”

 

Integrated Pay per Booking Listings: Property Managers

“With the integrated property manager listings, that (conversion) has been a challenge, those are lower converting listings for whole bunch of reasons. Some of them have to do with the complexity integrations and the systems they have and the quality of data that we get. Some of them have to do with the fact that those listings are marketed in a lot of different places, some of them have to do with the fact that some of those listings aren’t as price competitive, as the ones that we have that come in through the platform. And that’s regardless of where they sit on the sites.”

 

“Now we are keeping those listings pretty low (in search rankings), because until we see a high conversion rates, we don’t want to replace our subscription listings with those listings. And so until that happens, once we get conversion up and some of things are working on, some of them are technology oriented, some of them are have to do with, specifically how they are marketed on the sites and then have to do with many of those IPMs. For example today, we haven’t reported over the reviews yet and once we get the reviews it should help with conversion. And so there will be a double whammy -Once we get to the place where the conversion is adequate for us, then we will be incented to move them higher and you will get a combination of both effects.”

 

 

Marketing to Millennials

“…We’re just looking at the next generation of travelers in the Millennials and people who grew up with technology. I mean, our kids grew up with cellphones in their hands and they are used to getting things done instantly online, not talking on the phone, not negotiating with people. And so, if you’re going to be a player in this business from an owner perspective or property manager, the word we’re putting out is you’re going to have to adapt over the next few years.

 

“We are thankfully in a position where we deliver so much revenue for our customers that I think we can now take a leadership role and say to them, we’re done trying to just convince you, we’re now going to say you’ve got to make this happen in the next couple of years.

 

“And we’re going to – we’ll develop tools and all these other of things to make it easy for you. But in the long run, our belief is that we will capture more business and get more travelers staying in vacation rentals versus hotels by creating that experience.”

 

Sticking with Subscriptions

“Now, competitively, there are still a number of differences that will exist as the market evolves. So, I think all the major competitors will have online bookable inventory.

 

“However, what will be different on HomeAway? Online bookable doesn’t mean we’ll get out of the subscription business. Our customers love subscriptions, they love it. The vast majority of customers don’t want to be paying commissions to somebody. So, we are going to keep to that as a differentiator in our business, no question about it.”

 

Competitive Advantage

“We are going to be free to travelers. TripAdvisor and Airbnb have chosen to charge big fees to travelers. Well, we’re going to have a pretty sizeable marketing budget in the next few years. And we’re going to be letting everybody know, when you come to our platform and you don’t pay a fee and we think that’s a big deal, because if you look historically at the travel industry, those competitors who adopted no traveler fees first are the ones that ended up being the big winners in that business.”

Pricing

“There is no doubt that we can charge higher prices, we have said that consistently. But there is a limit.

 

If you look at right now naturally, what’s happening in our subscription prices, I mean was up 12% year-on-year this quarter and that’s been – I mean it’s been virtually every year, been in the business it’s between 12% and 14%, compounded every single year.

 

So prices are going up pretty rapidly. I think they will continue to go up pretty rapidly.

 

Now, we have opportunities. Lot of people asks this, well, when are you going to do geographic pricing? We are not working on geographic pricing right now, that’s potentially a long-term opportunity. People ask us, well, when you’re going to raise the high-end, because the value of being a platinum subscriber in your site is really high. And the answer of that is, yep that’s a huge opportunity we have too. And we may do a little bit of that in 2015.

 

But as long as the pricing is going up naturally, that’s a level we can save, if we need that in the future. And we really like to be the company that continues to deliver good value. Because if we take the value away that we deliver then we’re just the same as everybody else. And so, that’s also why I say the subscription business is a huge competitive advantage for us, because once somebody is a high performing customer in one of these businesses they have a preference for that, because it’s a better value and that makes them very sticky customers for us. And I am not sure everybody quite appreciates how important that is.”

Related Items
Click to add a comment

0 Comments

Leave a Reply

Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

OTAs
November 5, 2014
mm
VRM Intel Staff

Related Items

More in OTAs

Expedia CEO Talks Vrbo: We ‘Removed Vrbo from Google’s Vacation Rental Meta Product’

Amy HinoteFebruary 11, 2021
Read More
vacation rentals at the best price guaranteed

Stays Group Vacation Rental Network Opens SoutheastStays

Vince PerezFebruary 3, 2021
Read More

Vrbo Is Performing Better Than Airbnb for Vacation Rental Managers, But Direct Booking Still Number One Revenue Source . . . By A Lot

Amy HinoteJanuary 24, 2021
Read More

4th Annual #BookDirect Guest Education Day Is February 3, 2021

Amy HinoteJanuary 24, 2021
Read More

Airbnb Goes Public. CEO Brian Chesky: “Travel is never going to look like it did in January”

Amy HinoteDecember 10, 2020
Read More

6 Takeaways from Vrbo’s 2021 Consumer Travel Trend Report

Zandra WolfgramDecember 8, 2020
Read More
Scroll for more
Tap

Sponsor News

  • Kasa and Minut partner to protect properties all over the U.S.
    Sponsor NewsFebruary 11, 2021
  • The Pace Report Is Dead
    Sponsor NewsFebruary 10, 2021
  • How 2020 Played Out: Analyzing Performance in 10 Key Vacation Rental Destinations
    BusinessFebruary 10, 2021
  • Rented Launches New Automated Rate Tool for Vacation Rental Professionals
    Industry News for Vacation Rental ManagersJanuary 25, 2021
VRM Intel
Calendar of Events
Videos & Whitepapers
VRMintel Magazine
Subscribe
Advertise
About Us
Authors
Contact Us

Recent News

  • One Size Doesn’t Fit All in Owner Acquisition
    BusinessFebruary 23, 2021
  • Resort Collection Outsources Call Center to Jamaica
    BusinessFebruary 19, 2021
  • Bounce into 2021 with Tools to Help Heal and Focus
    BusinessFebruary 18, 2021
  • 12 Steps To Reclaiming Your Spirit of Hospitality From The Grasp Of Cynicism
    BusinessFebruary 18, 2021

View Current Issue

VRMintel Copyright © 2016-17 | Click HERE to Subscribe | Privacy Policy | Disclaimer | Copyright | Jobs | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn

Interview with Doug Macnaught, Former President and Co-Founder of Instant Software
Revenue and Yield Management: Overcoming Challenges Unique To The Vacation Rental Industry