Tripping says it is the first metasearch for vacation rentals to enable reservations facilitated within its own user interface.
Booking.com, the hotel reservations giant, was the first company to participate in Tripping's new on-site booking functionality.
If a user clicks on a Booking.com partner property, he or she can complete the entire transaction while remaining within Tripping's interface.
As is customary with facilitated booking, the goal is to boost the conversion rate -- which means more reservations and more commissions.
Co-branding is front-and-center in Tripping's on-site booking. The user experience signals that the user is doing business with Booking.com.
The confirmation email that follows a reservation is co-branded by Booking.com, which processes the transaction.
Not all of Tripping's partners are participating right now. To see ones that are, look for a little tag on the top of each rental listing in the search results that says something like “Book with Tripping”. (The startup is still testing its messaging.)
TripAdvisor, the metasearch and user reviews giant, has recently introduced a similar concept under the label "instant booking."
But the term "instant booking" is confusing when applied to the vacation rental industry.
Since May 2013, Tripping has had a variety of partners with "instantly bookable properties", meaning that a host does not need to be notified for a reservation to go through.
A raft of changes
The news of the functionality comes just two weeks after Tripping announced its latest funding round of $16 million.
Meanwhile, Tripping's CEO Jen O'Neal told Tnooz that her startup plans to introduce user logins soon. She says that more than 30% of the people who book a room through Tripping come back to book again. Logins could reduce the friction for repeat users.
O'Neal's company has about 20 employees. Last year, it processed 20 million in reservations, she said. This year, it expects to process $150 million in reservations.
It has been adding more luxury properties, which recently led to a one-off $100,000 reservation.
Much of its business has been generated by customers in the US, though she says Europe is "taking off" as a market for the company.
O'Neal is also pleased to be listing inventory from Homestay.com, a Dublin-based home-sharing platform where the host is private, which harks back to Tripping's early days with a focus on the social and cultural benefits of traveling and getting to live like a local.
TWO WEEKS AGO:Investors pour $16M into Tripping, a vacation rental search engine