This past winter, vacation rental giant HomeAway began adding inventory to travel metasearch giant Kayak.
Kayak, owned by Priceline Group, is currently testing the best way to display HomeAway’s vacation rental listings in its search results on its US platform.
The integration test is ongoing and the companies’ relationship is unchanged, despite HomeAway having been acquired by Expedia Inc last year.
By filtering lodging results by property type "Rental" and/or "Booking Providers", users can check out vacation rentals.
Yet as of now, "rental" is still not billboarded on Kayak's main homepage and navigation, the way activities and car rentals are listed as categories alongside flights and hotels.
Today Kayak is only displaying a slice of HomeAway's total inventory. If you search for listings in, say, Tampa, Fla, or West Palm Beach, Fla., on the two sites, you'll only see a couple of HomeAway choices on Kayak, but see more than 100 each on HomeAway itself.
Giorgos Zacharia, CTO of Kayak, explained:
"The vacation rental listings that we show have to meet certain criteria. They have to be instantly bookable and for full properties, not shared apartments. The quality of the listing also has to meet our standards (i.e. there must be a photo)."
Zacharia didn't reveal statistics on the amount of rental properties that are being booked via Kayak overall. But he said search volume is increasing, and the metasearch site is looking to add more inventory to meet demand. He said
"We have noticed that the growth is destination and length-of-stay specifically (i.e. ski destinations, or people that are searching for a week-long stay or longer)."
Metasearch rival Skyscanner doesn't yet include vacation rental inventory.
In an interview with Tnooz last year, HomeAway's chief executive Brian Sharples explained the advantage for online travel platforms for partnering with HomeAway:
"Forty percent of our properties are professional managers, and so it makes sense for OTAs to start in that part of the market since its closer to what they already deal with on the supply side."
Related:
Metasearch for vacation rentals gains momentum
HomeToGo secures $20 million to boost vacation rental metasearch