Expedia will begin including vacation rental listings from stablemate HomeAway in the next few months as the battle for alternative accommodation heats up.
The online travel agency will finally have a "full integration" of HomeAway content for the first time since the vacation rental giant was snapped up by parent owner Expedia Inc for $3.9 billion in November last year.
Brand Expedia originally had a vacation rental channel for searches (with a link off to HomeAway), but now president and CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says it will be a "much more fundamental integrated experience" for results on both Expedia and Hotels.com.
That integration will begin as a pilot in the fourth quarter of 2016 and see further work continuing into 2017.
Speaking on the earnings call for Expedia Inc's Q3 2016 results, Khosrowshahi adds:
"I think it's a great benefit both for Expedia and Hotels.com consumers because they're going to get more breadth and depth of inventory in market, especially in some of the markets where HomeAway is very strong.
"And then I think for HomeAway, our partner is there, the homeowners, the property managers, they are going to get a significant boost of demand from these terrific travel brands, especially in urban destinations."
The mention of "urban destinations" puts Expedia right in Airbnb's sweet spot - with cities and those looking for weekend breaks at popular destinations considered by some to be the preserve of the sharing economy giant.
Khosrowshahi says there are "two big players" in the alternative accommodation space - Expedia Inc and Airbnb - although he concedes arch rival on the hotel front, Booking.com, is "arguably a third".
He says:
"But the big player, Airbnb, has a private market cap of over $30 billion. And so we see this HomeAway opportunity as a very, very large opportunity, and we are going to invest behind it as that kind of an opportunity.
"This is not an incremental project for us. This is a big project for us."
HomeAway brought in $210 million in revenue during the third quarter, up by a massive 61%, year-on-year.
Other brands in the family saw gains over the same period, as follows:
- Core OTA (including Expedia, Hotels.com, Venere) - up 20% to $2.1 billion
- Egencia - up 19% to $112 million
- Trivago - up 57% to $276 million
Overall, revenue for the group climbed by 33%, to $2.5 billion, with adjusted EBITDA up 42% to $666.7 million.
Room nights across the portfolio were up 17% between Q3 2015 and 2016.