Vacation rental behemoth HomeAway has inked a deal with Priceline Group's KAYAK which will make HomeAway's vacation rental inventory available on the metasearch engine.
The integration will include up to 200,000 listings spanning across the world and is set to be completed by the end of the year.
This comes on the heels of HomeAway's $2 million investment in Turkey's Flat4Day. HomeAway has demonstrated a continued interest in consolidation and pushing to continually expand its own inventory of vacation rentals.
HomeAway CEO Brian Sharples has always spoken about how wider distribution outside of owned platforms is essential as his company grows its inventory. In an interview with Tnooz late last year, he said the following:
With respect to HomeAway, we own the category of accommodation and I think this is the year where everybody in the OTA space is trying to figure out how to make a play here.
TRIP is testing booking, Expedia is testing a partnership with us. And just like La Fourchette leads to OpenTable, now all of these companies are looking to the space. If a company comes after HomeAway, it comes down to whether to not they think they can do it better.
One of the ways to ensure HomeAway's continued dominance is to focus on how its platform can better serve the guests — and thus make it unsavory for OTAs to get into the business on their own without a partnerhsip such as the one with Kayak:
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.
There’s a lot of hand-holding with customer service and sales force-driven service products that are geared towards dealing with individual owners. Really none of those OTAs have that.
Displayed listings will only come from those property owners and managers that have agreed to participate in the HomeAway Expanded Distribution Network.
In addition, the listings will be searchable on KAKAK but will still require the transaction to be completed on whichever HomeAway site the property is listed on.
Kayak's CEO and co-founder Steve Hafner had this to stay about the deal's announcement:
This partnership makes it even easier for our users to search both hotels and vacation rentals at once to find a place to stay that’s right for them. The addition of these new listings means nearly one million lodging options will be searchable via KAYAK.
While KAYAK currently offers limited selection of vacation rentals within search, the HomeAway partnership greatly expands this to the travelers searching for accommodation on the metasearch engine.
NB: Vacation rental image courtesy Shutterstock.