In an exclusive interview, HomeAway global CMO, Mariano Dima shares insights with Morag Cuddeford-Jones

HomeAway, a global vacation homes rental site, has enjoyed a long partnership with 3DS, the three-day start up organisation based in Austin, Texas. The aim is to explore what entrepreneurs, students, technologists and professionals can conceive of as the next killer application in the travel space.

The company recently ran the third of these three-day events in its London office for the first time. HomeAway’s global CMO, Mariano Dima, explains why he gives his company’s time and resources over to this exercise - and others - several times a year and how the future of travel brands looks set to follow an ecosystem model:

EFT: What exactly is a three-day start up?

MD: It’s an entrepreneurial exercise. We invite students, professionals, designers, lawyers, developers, and so on to our offices for a three-day exercise where they can be mentored by HomeAway staff on the needs and constraints of the travel sector. Our partners in this, our first UK event, are 3DS which helps companies and individuals innovate through this platform. It’s been an enormously successful intellectual exercise for us - and the participants - and it’s very popular. We had lots of applications for the London event, which had to be whittled down to 50.

EFT: Why do you want HomeAway to be involved in this exercise?

MD: Ensuring that we as a company drive leadership thinking and innovation in the travel industry is one of our top priorities. We are always investing in products for mobile and the internet. This maintains not just our own pipeline but opens it up to thinking from great talent in other areas.

EFT: Isn’t opening your APIs to developers a brand risk - both a competitive and reputational point of view?

MD: Clearly, one of our key competitive advantages is having this open API that lets innovators and property managers talk to our marketplace. In that sense it’s important not just to be open but to innovate and drive the right kind of professionals to bring new ideas so that our products and services can always be better for travellers.

We have a strict process to ensure the API and access to it is not abused. It’s a simple way to work but there also needs to be a process in place to make sure that we work with the right participants. The more innovation in your API the more access entrepreneurs must be allowed. We believe this will help us maintain market leadership in vacation rentals.

The process comes from internal product teams who ensure that the way partners want to use the API is benefiting the traveller. For example, we’ve signed a lot of partnership agreements with Uber and Instacar in the US that layer on additional benefits to the traveller experience.

EFT: This puts HomeAway at the heart of an ecosystem model, rather than building everything internally under a single brand. What does this model mean for you and what are the implications for the travel sector as a whole?

MD:The vacation rental industry us worth about $100bn. Of that, we have 1m listings and a $16bn slice in 2015. There is still a lot of opportunity for entrepreneurs to build new businesses in this space. Our core belief is that there is still a lot of space to grow. An open system like ours is the best way to capture that growth. And it’s a win-win situation because whatever is developed, as long as it is done with the benefit of the traveller in mind, creates a great experience for our customers.

There is still a lot of opportunity for entrepreneurs to build new businesses in this space

We also know that our data shows 84% of travellers plan to book vacation rentals a second time after their first stay. The level of engagement with the sector after a first touch is very high. The more we are able to drive simplicity and innovation within our existing platforms is the way we accelerate growth and the positive perceptions of the sector as a whole.

EFT: How does a multiple partner model improve HomeAway’s reach?

MD: All the partnerships we have signed have their own customer base and they have their own solutions that we can leverage.

EFT: Do you see this approach spreading to other areas of the travel industry - hoteliers or airlines, for example?

MD: Clearly, this is a path that we definitely recommend. I can see that innovation in the travel industry is very active and there is a lot of potential opportunity. The range of participants we saw in our 3DS event came from all areas - design, development, finance, CRM and so on. You can see that there are plenty of areas where innovation will deliver a much better experience for travellers.

The key area to focus on right now is mobile and that’s why we’ve invested heavily in it. Two companies have already built their own hospitality manager apps to help property owners and travellers connect.

EFT: Where, if anywhere, would you urge caution?

MD: By design we have an open platform. With professionals partnering with us we don’t find a great deal of risk because ultimately what we offer is scale and access - we had more than a billion visits last year. Having the right processes means you end up with the right kind of services within the ecosystem.

Having the right processes means you end up with the right kind of services within the ecosystem

EFT: What do see are the most interesting areas of development for your brand?

MD: Ideas that help solve problems and reduce friction for owners and travellers are ones that are really interesting. Holidays are really precious times for people and we want to make that process as simple as possible. It needs to have more content, be a more immersive experience that makes sure you get information and something that you wouldn’t from the traditional way of travelling.

Morag Cuddeford-Jones is a writer, researcher and broadcaster specialising in the travel and marketing sectors. Covering a global footprint, she specialises in disruptive technologies and innovations in multichannel marketing including mobile and programmatic