I have worked extensively with homeaway and its many websites over the last several years. About 50% of my client base is in that industry (w/ roughly 25% inns and 25% hotels/resorts).
They are a fine company. Please allow me to give a bit of informal history.
They started years ago in that space and it was cluttered with directories, much like the B&B space. VRBO.com was the clear leader though.
The difference was that Homeaway went out and got venture capital and then proceeded to buy dozens of other websites in that same space and now DOMINATE that market, which is considerably bigger than the B&B space. By 2008 that had received 450 Million in venture capital! (the got a few million since then too). in 2008 it is estimated the vacation rental space was doing $25 Billion in reservations and was 8% of the lodging marketspace. pretty big huh!
So, right now Homeaway is sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars of Cash trying to figure out how to spend it wisely. A problem that put many dotcoms out of business during the last 10 years.
Vacation Rental By owner (VRBO) and VAcation Rental Managers (VRMS) are a lot like innkeepers... VRBOs own their house and are emotionally very attached to it. They tend to be mom and pops and spend their money carefully. Many VRMs are also like innkeepers... they manage 10-50 homes much like you manage your inn. They are not the corporate types you find in hotels. There are also very large VRMs with 500+ homes and huge operations. Also, like innkeepers the vast majority of their bookings come from their websites AND they don't like paying commissions to the likes of Expedia. They like to pay annual fees for a listing.
As an aside, I would recommend to many innkeepers they look at becoming Vacation Rental Managers... it is a neat business model. If you are good at renting your homes and taking care of your homeowners, your business has no limits to your growth. Depending on your geographic market you earn typically earn 15% - 35% of all the revenue + lots of fees. The overhead is much lower because there is no mortgage to pay. Check out the
Vacation Rental Managers Association if you want to learn more.
Anywho... I don't think Homeaway will mess with BedandBreakfast.com -- they are very smart! Surely smart enough not to clutter up "bedandbreakfast.com" with unrelated listings like hotels or vacation rentals.
I think they bought them to get ahold of their technologies like Rezovation and Webervations and their web platform, which as all you know is good at upselling for additional placements and services. I hope they roll these out to the VRBO industry! If you want to read more about this and my opinion on it, see my blog post about why
Homeaway Acquisition of BedandBreakfast.com is Smart
So don't fret... BedandBreakfast.com will still try to dominate the market, charge a fair price for the value it provides you, and service the B&B industry. And, hopefully Eric will enjoy his retirement and resist the temptation to start a new business.
In case you missed it, here is Homeaway's Superbowl ad if you are interested (BTW, would it be so bad to have a B&B superbowl ad?):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cey36NRK0vQ
[edited by swirt to make the video a link instead of autoplay].