Short-Term Rental and Vacation Rental News

Priceline's Jeffery Boyd is going out -- from the CEO post, at least -- at the top, and the guy with a banker's demeanor will come to be viewed as a rock star of online and mobile travel. We don't know about groupies, but there certainly are a ton of imitators.

This will be an interesting dance for HomeAway, which clearly wants to cater more to the major players, meaning professionally managed properties.

The city is an urban playground for visitors and locals alike and we'd like to see its new leader take inspiration from his sometimes dictatorial and always opinionated predecessor.

HomeAway's history is rollups in the vacation rental space, from around the globe. It has this down.

Expedia partnered with HomeAway on vacation rentals last week. One day it is going to partner with or acquire a sharing economy company built in the Airbnb mold, depending how the market shakes out. When you are as big as Expedia, you can afford to sit back and see how things shape up.

By launching this new luxury site, HomeAway is leveraging existing assets and tweaking them a bit with a dose of curation. Given the rise of vacation clubs and the supposed boom in luxury travel, this move makes a lot of sense.

The presence of established players such as HomeAway and TripAdvisor, plus a market that isn't as addressable as it might appear, will make the vacation rental startup sector the next bubble.

If Expedia was worried about angering hotels by pushing into vacation rentals, the cat is now officially out of the bag. Another factor behind the Expedia-HomeAway deal is that Booking.com has been making inroads in the U.S. with its 356,000 properties, and Expedia is hungering for more supply.

Regardless of the growing pains, peer-to-peer services such as Airbnb are on track for dramatic growth. NYC and other cities are going to have to find ways to deal with it.

TripAdvisor isn't an online travel agency because it doesn't take flight or hotel bookings. But, given its desire to expand further into a solution for in-destination tours and activities, you can make the argument that it is a more well-rounded one-stop shop for travel than many of the travel booking sites.