VRBO

David Clouse built the first version of Vrbo — Vacation Rental By Owner — in 1995 in Colorado, listing his own vacation home. The idea was simple: homeowners could list their properties directly and travelers could book them, cutting out the traditional vacation rental agencies that took large commissions.

It launched before Google, before broadband, and before online payment systems existed. Clouse ran it as a bootstrapped side project through the early years.

By the late 1990s, the site had tens of thousands of listings and real revenue. HomeAway acquired Vrbo in 2006 and made it the anchor of a portfolio of vacation rental platforms.

Expedia Group then bought HomeAway in 2015 for $3.9 billion — and Vrbo came along as part of the deal.

Vrbo is a marketplace that connects homeowners and property managers with travelers looking to book entire homes — not rooms, not shared spaces. Hosts list their properties and pay either a subscription fee ($499 per year) or a per-booking commission of about 8%.

Travelers also pay a service fee on top of the nightly rate. Vrbo makes money on both sides of every transaction.

The platform focuses exclusively on whole-home rentals, which differentiates it from Airbnb's broader offering that includes room shares and hotel rooms. Whole-home rentals tend to attract longer bookings, larger groups, and higher average transaction values.

Vrbo's core product is the vacation rental listing platform — search, filter, book, and pay for entire homes, cabins, condos, and villas worldwide. The platform has over 2 million listings across 190 countries.

The mobile app handles booking, messaging with hosts, and trip management. Vrbo also has a host management toolkit with pricing guidance, calendar sync, and review management.

In 2020, Expedia folded its HomeAway brand into Vrbo, consolidating the vacation rental portfolio under a single brand. Vrbo also partnered with Book with Confidence, a payment protection and cancellation guarantee product that addressed host-and-traveler trust issues.

Vrbo grew in the 1990s and 2000s almost entirely through organic search traffic and homeowner word-of-mouth — no VC funding, no growth hacks, just a useful site that homeowners found and listed on. After the HomeAway and Expedia acquisitions, growth shifted to being part of Expedia's cross-platform marketing machine.

Expedia cross-promotes Vrbo inventory to its broader hotel and flight customer base. The COVID pandemic was an unexpected growth catalyst — travelers avoided hotels and short-term whole-home rentals spiked.

Vrbo's whole-home focus suddenly looked like exactly what a post-COVID traveler wanted. Revenue for Vrbo-attributed bookings reached approximately $2 billion annually within Expedia by 2022.

Airbnb. Plain and simple.

After Airbnb's IPO in December 2020 at an $86 billion valuation, Vrbo's parent company Expedia had a market cap of around $20 billion total. Airbnb had become culturally synonymous with vacation rentals in a way that Vrbo never achieved despite being 13 years older.

Vrbo also lost the brand battle — most people say Airbnb generically to mean any vacation rental, the way people say Kleenex for tissue. Vrbo's strategy has been to differentiate on whole-home purity and family travel, which is a defensible niche but a narrower one.

Being inside Expedia gives it distribution but also makes it a product line, not a standalone story.

Vrbo was bootstrapped in its early years before being acquired by HomeAway in 2006. HomeAway itself raised over $500 million in venture funding and went public in 2011 on NASDAQ before being acquired by Expedia in 2015 for $3.9 billion.

Since then, Vrbo has operated entirely within Expedia Group's balance sheet. Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE) is the parent entity, with a market cap that has ranged between $15 billion and $25 billion in recent years.