PlanetEye
Travel Beyond Words
November 11th, 2008
HomeAway Raises a Stunning $250-million
- Mark Evans
- Director, Community
Given the current economic climate, there’s obviously some concern about whether people are going to travel and how their travel behavior will change. Many people believe travel/vacations are seen as a priority, and that lower prices will encourage people to book and take trips.
Even so, it’s exciting and stunning to see HomeAway raise $250-million in venture capital in a round led by Technology Crossover Partners, which invested $175-million. It is the largest VC deal done by a technology company since 2000, and brings HomeAway’s total funding to $405-million.
For people who haven’t heard about HomeAway, it’s a $100-million online business that lets travelers book vacation homes in the U.S. and Europe. HomeAway features 325,000 paid listings, and visitors book between 225,000 and 300,000 vacations a month.
For anyone involved with the online travel business – such as PlanetEye – the deal is a huge endorsement that the Web continues to be a vibrant and exciting market for travel. eMarketer, for example, expects the U.S. online travel market will grow to $166.2-billion by 2011 from $109.7-billion in 2008.
What’s exciting is the online travel market continues to evolve and become an even better place for people to book and plan their trips and vacations. It wasn’t that long ago that the Web was mostly used to book flights, hotels and rental cars – aka Travel 1.0.
Today, people can access a tremendous amount of insight and information about destinations around the world from places such as PlanetEye to give themselves a real sense of where to go and what to do – aka Travel 2.0.
As for what HomeAway plans to do with $250-million, the New York Times suggests the company will pay down $88-million of debt and perhaps buy back shares from its employees. HomeAway could also make a few acquisitions given it has bought 10 companies over the past four years.
Tags: homeaway, Travel, venture capital
One Response to “HomeAway Raises a Stunning $250-million”
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November 17th, 2008 at 6:44 am
This is encouraging, as I am (small, wee pup) in this ‘Space’ as well. My site is simple, but we are developing some very cool ‘Points of Difference’ to really differentiate us from you big guys. I am excited because it was only a couple of years ago when there was no ‘Social Travel’ sites on the web, and now there are More, but there is room for competition, and Difference. You guys have a great site, well done. I hope we get there on day soon. Happy travels.