How Flipkey plans to get back in the game
Skift Take
Flipkey will continue to try to differntiate itself through reliable user reviews and inbound traffic from TripAdvisor, but it will need to overcome its parent company's propensity to under-invest in its non-TA properties.
Flipkey CEO TJ Mahony knows something about competing, having earlier in his career created the Compete.com website. But his TripAdvisor-owned vacation rental website has a mountain to climb if it is even to get into the conversation with its bigger rival HomeAway.
Traffic figures from what used to be Mahony's Compete.com, which measures the U.S. online travel marketplace, tell part of the story. As of May 20, HomeAway.com boasted nearly 2.3 million monthly unique visitors and Flipkey had about 30% of that, or 676,671.
That doesn't even take into account HomeAway-owned VRBO.com, which recorded even larger traffic than HomeAway.com at nearly 2.9 million monthly unique visitors, according to Compete. (Compete's numbers aren't exact, but they do a better job than most of approximating market share.)
Part of this huge scale advantage for HomeAway is reflected on the search engine optimization front, which is key for vacation rental owners and property
