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@Elaine701
I had already published this post on another thread, but I'm posting it again:
In 2005 Brian Sharples and Carl Shephard founded the Rental Platform „Home Away“, they were based in the USA. They bought up all the leading local Rental Platforms in various countries around the world including VRBO (USA), Fewo-Direkt (Germany), Abritel (France), Owners Direct (UK), Stayz (Australia), there are more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomeAway
The way they ran their business was, that they kept all the various local names for the original platforms in each country. But they developed an integrated software, that was finally used by all the platforms with all the various names around the world.
As You can see, even tough the names of the platforms on the left top corner are different, the startpage looks exactely the same. The „platform“ fewo-direkt is very well known in Germany, they had 2.5 million pagevisits last month, but outside Germany noone knows them. On the other hand, almost noone in Germany knows vrbo, despite the fact that they had 50 million pagevisits last moth, 83% of those came from the US.So all the various „platroms“ combined may have 100 million pageviews, whereas airbnb had 76 million. The killer application in terms of pagevisits is booking.com though. They had 260 millions pagevisits in march, and they came from all around the world.
Anyway, if You list Your place on VRBO, Your place will be shown worldwide on maybe 20 or 30 different platforms that all have a different name.
In 2015 HomeAway including vrbo got bought up by Expedia and they still onwn it.
cc: @Trude0 @Dimitar27 @Dimitar27 @Alexandra316 @Sarah977