Expedia Group is dropping its HomeAway platform for vacation rentals. Instead, the online travel company is focusing its rental business on the similar Vrbo brand.
Starting next month, those who visit the HomeAway website will be redirected to the Vrbo site, and users of the HomeAway mobile app will receive a notification to download the Vrbo app.
According to a press release, there will not be any changes to HomeAway reservations that have already been booked, and users' login details for Vrbo will remain the same as whatever they were for HomeAway.
So if you have a HomeAway rental reserved in upcoming weeks, you should still be good to go with no further actions required on your part. HomeAway UK will remain in operation for British customers.
In the release, Expedia describes the change as a way to "simplify its vacation rental brand portfolio."
That makes sense given that HomeAway and Vrbo have no major differences between their offerings and, as the release doesn't mention, Expedia has faced financial uncertainty, layoffs, and management shake-ups in recent months due in large part to stiff competition from Google and Airbnb.
And that was before the pandemic hit.
Vrbo, which was established in 1995 as VRBO (short for Vacation Rentals By Owner), was acquired in 2006 by HomeAway. The latter was gobbled up in turn by Expedia in 2015.
Expedia launched the refreshed Vrbo last year. The brand now covers properties in 15 countries.
