Helping You Book Vacation Rentals: FlipKey CEO T. J. Mahoney (Part 7)

SM: There are certain types of metrics which are in your hands which you could provide. How many hits does any given property get? What kind of click through rates do they get?

TM: We absolutely care about those statistics. That is entirely how we measure our value for some of our clients. They are only charged if we indeed deliver that value based on those metrics. We very much keep our eye on those stats. There is no reason for people to renew their service if we are not providing value, and that is one of our ways of tracking value.

SM: Geographically, there are some areas which are more popular than others. How do you tackle that? How do you attract travelers to go [to less popular areas]?

TM: At the end of the day there are traditional vacation rental spots such as Orlando, Destin, [Florida], Vail, and so forth. We have a tremendous amount of inventory in any place you would consider a vacation rental hot spot. Across the board you would be surprised how ubiquitous vacation rentals have become in a lot of travel areas. We have over 200 listings in New York City and over 20 in downtown Boston.

Even in the urban areas we are seeing a lot of vacation rentals. In Europe they have been popular for five decades. It does not matter if you are going to Tuscany or London, you can find a tremendous amount of options. Yes, someone might be offering their home in an area that is not typically a hot spot, but the fact of the matter is if they are offering it, they have likely seen some type of interest in it.

I actually asked a friend who is on the border of Nebraska and Colorado to create a listing of his parent’s home so that I could test functions on the site in a live environment knowing that no one would ever go there. I ended up getting five inquiries from people who wanted to rent the home for a week because they wanted to go pheasant hunting. There is not even a hotel in the town. You just never know what people are looking for.

SM: What is the exit strategy for this company? Is it fair to expect that you will eventually get fully absorbed into TripAdvisor?

TM: Correct. We work under the assumption that even though we are not wholly owned, we are a TripAdvisor company. There are mechanisms in place that make it relatively confident to both parties that FlipKey will be owned at some point in the future.

SM: I am sure that I will be using your site. I travel a lot and it is always fun to use new services. Thank you very much for sharing your business strategy with us.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Helping You Book Vacation Rentals: FlipKey CEO T. J. Mahoney
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