As always, I want to thank our customers and the loyal users of this Community for using our products, providing feedback, and helping us understand your marketing needs. I recognize the last several months have been frequented with change for our customer base, and change can be scary. I want to assure you there are reasons behind these changes, and I hope to use this forum as an opportunity to explain how we got where we are today.
Our goal has always been to serve, as best as we can, the vacation rental industry. Since the start of the company in 2005 and over the course of the following years, in addition to focusing on our organic growth, we employed a strategy of acquiring other key vacation rental websites. This resulted in HomeAway, Inc. becoming the umbrella company for over 20 sites in an effort to be the best marketing partner for owners and managers all over the world.
While this set a strong foundation for broad traveler reach and global recognition, it also created lots of complexity for our company and our customers. The acquisition of 10+ vacation rental sites resulted in managing multiple technology platforms, owner dashboards and versions of the listing manager. I can’t tell you how many times I was asked by owners why they couldn’t manage their listings in one place or purchase listings as a bundle, and how much it pained me to answer those questions. But I knew it would take time for us to consolidate these systems and make the right solutions for the most users.
The consolidation of our platforms and technologies caused some challenges over the years, but we have entered the next phase of this company’s evolution where we can focus on bringing additional value to our customers with new tools and marketing options. This year, following the migration of the VRBO.com platform onto the HomeAway.com platform, we launched Network bundles. This was a crucial step in offering a global presence for your rental property to maximize your return on investment with our sites. Happily, the time and cost-savings associated with this change is one that has been well-received.
Other changes, though, have not been as well received. As part of our goal in enabling owners and managers to manage their listings in one place, we also have to standardize the listing manager tools themselves so that they are the same across the globe. This, in turn, means change for just about everyone and most recently, this happened in the update of our rates structure.
The goal of our new rates format was to provide a more consistent experience for travelers, while generating higher demand and more qualified inquiries to you with quotable rates. Additionally, the new format was designed to:
* Reduce the manual work of providing quotes to travelers
* Power our search results with more accurate prices based on stay dates
* Display consistent prices to a global audience of travelers
* Enable your property to be bookable online, if you choose, while providing control over who stays in your
rental home
* Provide full credit for the rates component as part of your sort order
Unfortunately, the outcome of this change included some unanticipated results for which we sincerely apologize.
Each employee at HomeAway, including me, spends a couple days on the customer support line as part of a program to bring us closer to the needs and concerns of our customers. By coincidence, I happened to be manning the support lines on the day that we launched the quotable rates format.
I fielded some challenging calls and learned first-hand about your concerns. I also gained an appreciation of the importance of rates, the wide range of approaches to setting rates and providing quotes, and some of the challenges you’ve had in using quotable rates.
We are disappointed that we failed to anticipate the complexity of many of our customers’ rates, and we are working diligently to fix this. You can read more about the changes to come from our Chief Product Officer, Tom Hale.
The good news is there is light at the end of the tunnel. We are offering a solution for those of you who wish to revert to the traditional rates structure until we get it right. Quotable rates are our ultimate goal in improving the traveler experience, but we first need to ensure it works for our paying customers. In the next few days, you will be able to switch back to the previous rates format if you feel that quotable rates does not work for you at this time, and we will continue to make improvements to better serve you.
Please hang in there with us and look for my blog post in the next few days on online booking, an exciting new marketing option we are offering. With online booking, travelers will have the convenience of paying securely online while still providing you with a 24-hour reservation review period to establish a personal connection with your guests if you so desire. The feature will be 100% optional, but we aim to make the booking process more streamlined for both you and your guests, and quotable rates play a huge role in this endeavor.
We ask for your patience as we continue to work through these changes together, and we ask you to trust that we really have your best interest at heart. The changes over the last year have been a valuable learning experience for us, and we will use these learnings to continue to improve our products and better serve you.
And as always, we welcome your questions, comments, and feedback.
