Orbitz adds Vacation Rentals

The vacation rental market is a multi-billion dollar industry. The market leader in this space has primarily been HomeAway with their acquisitions of VRBO.com, CyberRentals.com, GreatRentals.com, A1Vacations.com, TripHomes.com, Holiday-Rentals.co.uk, Holiday-Rentals.fr, FeWo-direkt.de, Abritel, and HomeAway.es.

Home Away is now facing strong competition with the recent launch of vacation rentals by Orbitz.com.  Through a partnership with Zonder.com, a Salt Lake City based company, Orbitz is now offering about 30,000 fully furnish vacation properties in North America, Central America and the Caribbean.

As with the single family home rental market, the vacation market is extremely fragmented.  For example, about 15% of the total number of single family rental homes on the market are managed by property managers. The remaining 85% are done by real estate investors or the property owners themselves.

Zonder.com currently only offers access to around 30,000 homes, condos, townhomes, etc. that are professionally managed. This is compared to the over 115,000 available privately managed and professionally managed homes on HomeAway.

Overtime, I see Orbitz also offering privately managed vacation rentals on their site. Of course these homes and owners would have to meet a certain criteria of insurance, customer satisfaction, etc. but is inevitable if Orbitz wants to be successful in taking away market share from the competition.

This is a great first move for Orbitz and it wouldn’t surprise me if we start to see Expedia and the like enter the vacation market as well.