Everyone loves a good expansion tale, and this one's a beaut.
In May, Austin-based vacation rental service HomeAway bought a minority stake in TuJia, China's pioneering, year-old vacation rental service provider.
Joining in the financing were Ctrip, China's biggest OTA, and venture capital firms Lightspeed China Partners and CDH Investments.
This month we began to see the fruits of that series A investment.
Nearly 2,000 international listings, a subset of HomeAway's claimed 720,000-home inventory, have been translated to Mandarin and posted on TuJia. The listings were selected for translation because they had the best chances of appeal to middle class and wealthy Chinese travelers.
TuJuia used to only list Chinese rentals. Its staff are doing the translations.
Additionally, HomeAway entered into an agreement last week with Wego, a Singapore-based startup that has become the top travel metasearch site in the Asia Pacific and Middle East. Wego is now listing 400,000 rentals from HomeAway, FlipKey, Stayz, Travelmob, and Marketing Villas, covering 15,000 destinations globally.
The two deals heighten awareness of vacation rentals in Asia. A couple of other interesting stats:
- 39 million Chinese traveled overseas in the first half of 2012 [Reuters]
- APAC is forecasted to overtake North America and Europe as the largest travel market in 2013 [PhoCusWright]