Vacation rental marketplace HomeAway will dramatically improve its customer experience through a new online booking strategy, according to CEO Brian Sharples.
“Our new online booking strategy will support multiple payment methods including offline payments,” Sharples said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings conference call on Tuesday, according to Seeking Alpha. “This flexibility will allow all suppliers to adopt and use online booking enabling us to achieve the aggressive milestone we set to dramatically improve customer experience for our travelers.”
While online booking remains the single-most impactful initiative to improve traveler experience, Sharples said HomeAway’s listing quality initiatives are also delivering meaningful results.
“For example, measuring and reporting owner responsiveness has made a significant impact on response time,” he explained. “A recent analysis of the vast majority of our U.S. suppliers suggests that travelers who receive a response within 24 hours is up nearly 50% year-over-year. In addition to improving listing quality and ease of booking, we’re focused on maximizing trust and minimizing fraud within our marketplace. During the fourth quarter, we implemented security improvements such as two-factor authentication and a new risk engine which have led to significant reductions in fraud so far in 2015.”
This month mark’s HomeAway’s 10th anniversary.
“I’m incredibly proud of what our extraordinary team has accomplished over the past decade,” Sharples said. “During that period, HomeAway has experienced consistent and impressive growth in both revenue and free cash flow doing what we do best bringing friends and families together in whole houses all over the globe.”
The company announced a new global integrated marketing campaign, “which brings to life the joy and spirit of what makes the HomeAway product offering so unique and special. At the center of the campaign is our new brand platform, the whole house, the whole family, a whole vacation. These words embody the core benefits upon which HomeAway and the Vacation Rental category were built. And they were carefully chosen to differentiate and highlight what we do best at HomeAway.”
Growth in traffic has accelerated the past two quarters, but HomeAway continues to see slow growth in Europe offset by stronger growth in the U.S. and other geographies.
“We remain focused on this critical area of our business, particularly in Europe, where traffic is still not as robust as we would like,” Sharples said.
HomeAway’s commission based pay-per-booking product is now available as an option on all U.S. sites and most of its sites in Europe and Asia Pacific, or more than 80% of its global network.
“And as we have assessed previously, monetization of these listings continues to track above our initial expectations and we’re approaching that of a subscription listing when annualized,” Sharples said. “We see opportunity for further improvement through conversion enhancements and increased demand. After a year in the pay-per-booking business, we’ve learned that conversion is just as, if not more important, than property counts in driving revenue from performance-based listings. Therefore, in the fourth quarter, we continue to focus our energy on conversion rather than on additional pay-per-booking supply from large property managers. And I’m pleased to report that our efforts led to a meaningful improvement in conversion in both the U.S. and Europe property manager pay-per-booking listings during the fourth quarter. As we have said previously, we’re committed to driving the adoption of online booking to nearly all listings by the end of 2016 and expect to make significant progress toward that goal during 2015.”