Vrbo plans greater traveler targeting through marketing tech

Expedia vacation rental brand Vrbo has developed a promotion suite to make more personalized offers to travelers.

Where the brand had only been able to offer week and monthly discounts in the past, it now hopes to improve the proposition for travelers through promotions such as mobile deals, member-only deals for OneKey members and last-minute offers. The enhancements are enabled by the group’s new technology platform, according to Tim Rosolio, vice president of vacation rental partnerships for Expedia Group.

In an interview with PhocusWire at the Short Stay Summit in London, Rosolio also said vacation rental packages deals on Expedia and Vrbo including, for example, flights or car rental, were also in the cards to help “suppliers to target audiences and for travelers to get great value.”

He described the OneKey loyalty program, which enables travelers to earn and redeem points across the company's three main brands—Expedia, Vrbo and Hotels.com—as the differentiator for the group and for Vrbo, in particular, as it becomes increasingly targeted with its offers.

Rosolio said that the platform convergence, which is now mostly completed, provides the brands with the ability to “stitch the value together,” and is also driving growth for Vrbo, which Expedia Group CEO Ariane Gorin also called out during a recent earnings call.

Work on Vrbo’s product, marketing and supply—the company added one million units primarily in urban areas—helped fuel the growth in 2024, she said, and now the company has “some exciting plans coming in 2025 … so we’re going to continue leaning in.”

In addition to the focus on growth and the promotions initiative, Rosolio also said Vrbo is “doubling down on quality” and will part ways with partners that are not delivering “great travel experiences.”

“We think supply quantity is a vanity metric. We believe that the real metric that matters is delivering great experiences and having those travelers come back to our platform because the experience was so good.”

He declined to put a percentage around how many properties might be dropped but warned that partners that cancel bookings or get bad reviews would be removed from the platform.

AI enhancements

Rosolio also discussed artificial intelligence (AI) and how Vrbo fits in with Expedia’s three-pronged strategy for the technology. While it’s early days for the vacation rental brand and AI, he said there are obvious use cases for chatbots to take care of the “most simple service problems that people used to have to dial in for.”

Rosolio also said AI could play a role for onboarding properties and pricing, adding that the company had already “dabbled” in those areas.

“One of the areas that I’m most excited about within Vrbo is onboarding now. If there are individual owners that are trying to do their property, it will give you an AI-based starter [kit] based on some of the content you've already provided for us,” he said.

“With something like that, we have to be careful that we still are making sure we're describing the uniqueness of homes because that's one of the great things about our category. So I view that as more of a starter template than something that's a finished product.”

Rosolio said that early trials with AI and descriptions have already helped boost onboarding conversion.

The company has also learned from its experience with the technology so far. For example, he said while “hero images” such as those showing beaches or swimming pools chosen for hotels have really helped drive conversion, the images need to be more about the property for vacation rentals.

“The prompt picked a picture that was either of the ocean or pool, I guess because people dwell on those pictures a lot. But, the problem is if you do that, you have an entire website filled with pictures of water rather than the home,” said Rosolio. 

“We know that for vacation rentals the home is such a big part of the value proposition. We got a load of feedback from partners on it and quickly changed that.”