Stayz finally being put out of its misery
At BnbGuard we keep a close eye on holiday rental sites so we’ve noticed Stayz languishing at the back of the pack for technology, usability, data quality and new listings for a while now. Now we can confirm what we suspected – The owner is shutting it down.
HomeAway bought Stayz 4 years ago for $220 million. At the time the site was a cash cow with a lock on the market. Then came Airbnb and Stayz was blown out of the market. For the last 2 years or so it simply hasn’t been a competition between them. The announcement that Stayz is a dead site walking is just accepting the inevitable.
HomeAway is trying its best to compete with Airbnb and has spent a lot of money buying up holiday rental sites in different countries. However, these brands haven’t really been worth much against the juggernaut of Airbnb. It’s another triumph of execution & speed over brand value.
HomeAway’s strategy is to cross link listings on all its sister sites, so a listing on Stayz would automatically appear on HomeAway and VRBO and TravelMob, etc. This plumps up the number of listings that show in search results. We’ve seen this increasing over the past few months in particular.
The other strategy it has is to lower its IT costs but moving all sister sites to a single UX and technology platform. We can see this starting to happen as well, though it will take a few years to move all its sites over to a common platform. The main reason for this is that HomeAway cannot ever take its foot off the customer experience pedal lest it lose ground to Airbnb, so it has to both improve its varied platforms and try to synergise them. Not an easy task.
For stratas and councils, this is actually bad news. What it means is that people who go to Stayz because of the brand pull will get redirected to HomeAway, with a better experience and more listings. This probably means higher STR activity than you’d otherwise expect. We predict this will hit the high-end and coastal properties that are Stayz’s bread and butter more than the inner city apartments, which aren’t very common on Stayz. So if you’ve got these properties, something to watch out for.
