Vacation rental search site Tripping is initiating an
aggressive expansion strategy led by a new executive team.
Two of the four new hires are women, making the company’s
senior management 43% female, notable in the male-dominated business of online
travel.
Jen O'Neal and Jeff Manheimer created Tripping in 2009.
O’Neal will become executive chairman and retain her role as president. She'll lead the company’s brand awareness and global development, including
expansion into European and Asian markets and opening an office in South
America by the end of this year.
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She will also continue as chairman of the board.
Manheimer moves into the CEO role and will focus his
attention on investing in products and technology that can reinforce
Tripping’s strong position in the vacation rental industry.
“Over the past quarter, we’ve focused on building our senior
executive team. Now that we have a full exec team in place, Jen is able to put
her energy into external initiatives while I focus on empowering our team to
build the best and most comprehensive vacation rental search engine in the
world,” says Manheimer.
New to Tripping are Melissa Bachman-Wood as chief
product officer, Kristina Davis as chief commercial officer, Steve Morin as
chief technology officer and Sunil Pareenja as chief financial officer. They join
O’Neal, Manheimer and chief revenue officer Kendall Fargo.
Tripping is one of a number of metasearch sites, as well as AllTheRooms, that has arrived on the scene since the explosion of vacation rental in recent years.
It provides rates and availability for more than
12 million vacation rental properties in 150,000 destinations, including properties
listed on HomeAway, VRBO, Booking.com and from international and locally owned
sites.
Like others in the sector, though. it still misses out on the Holy Grail of rental metasearch - taking an official and direct feed from Airbnb for users to compare properties alongside those of other providers.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified O'Neal's and Manheimer's roles.