The two experiences are different...

So HomeAway has a lot of professional managers. These are managing companies that handle guest arrivals, cleaning etc on behalf of a home owner.

My partner in my startup also runs an agency/manager business with about 600 properties. (Some exclusive, some non-exclusive). I probably should have added a disclaimer on my initial post about my involvement in the industry.

Now anyway, on the exclusive properties, he controls the calendars. The company knows exactly if a property is bookable and they don't have to go to the property owners to check availability before taking a booking.

Of these 600 rentals, let's say 150 were actually marketed on HomeAway. You would pick a good spread of rentals so that you optimize your enquiries... You want as many enquiries as possible, EVEN if the properties are unavailable... This is because it wouldn't be cost effective to list everything. In one destination, he has about 90% of the entire locations rentals. Why pay for more listings when you are going to be getting any enquiry from an individual anyway. Keeping in mind these listings are anywhere from 700-1000$ per year.

The problem however, is when your 100k investment is actually used as a pivot for the company to subsidise the transition to a different business model and the inevitable buyout. HomeAway performed the biggest bait and switch in the history of marketplaces.

They decides that this listing model which previously ranked properties based on subscription level, is now going to only be part of the equation. Anyone who has been on a subscription model has seen a huge decrease in enquiries over the last year. This is because the visibility of their listings has also decreased as HomeAway push other forms of revenue ahead of them... (They already have your subscription revenue.. why bother sending guests to you when we can send them to rentals who have instant book enabled).

> Paraphrasing what the account manager told us....

"Based on our consumer feedback, we know that most of our guests want a book now experience, so if you don't have book now with instant booking enabled on your rental you won't have an optimized ranking score."

We even have PDF's that they produced to explain to people how to get the highest ranking on HomeAway. The biggest factor coming in to play was enabling instant booking.

(This means that people who aren't paying a subcription will out rank you regardless if they are even on a paid subscription level).

The other irony, is that the company that they use for their instant bookings to handle payments gives HomeAway a kickback of a percentage for providing the merchant facilies. (Plus HomeAway take a booking comission).

..........

AirBnb is great for instant bookings and for businesses just starting out (this is because they can adapt their business to suit themarketplace). However, for managers who are established, moving to a "Instant Book" model means either increasing their rates by 12-15%, or taking more comission from the owners of the rentals.

Where-as there pay to list model didn't have these problems.

Hope that shed's some light on why AirBnb and HomeAway aren't true-rivals. Professional managers will always find it hard to use AirBnb because they won't neccessarily control the calendars and real time availability. (This is the same reason why some people refuse to use Booking.com, because of extremely burdonsome booking conditions that are enforced on them).

Secondly, as a large manager, cashflow becomes a huge issue. Marketplaces won't pay you until the guest has left. This means that you have millions of euroes/dollars/pounds locked up for 6-9 months of the year.