Expedia Aquires Austin-Based HomeAway for… (Take a Lamaze Breath) $3.9 BILLION

Let me ask you this: does anyone plan a vacation from the newspaper anymore? Further proof of just how much (and how quickly) our society is shunning print media and turning to the web is when the big boys put their money where their mouth is. Originally founded as a division of Microsoft, Expedia.com is the American-based parent company to several global online travel brands including Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Hotwire.com, trivago, Egencia (formerly Expedia Corporate Travel), Venere.com, Expedia Local Expert, Classic Vacations, Expedia CruiseShipCenters, Travelocity and Orbitz. The company is probably valued around 8 billion. And they just snatched up Austin-based HomeAway for $3.9 billion.

The company’s first CEO was Richard Barton, who later went on to found Zillow!

Richard Barton, founder of Zillow

I remember when HomeAway started back in February of 2005, founded by Brian Sharples and Carl Shepherd. It was an on-line portal to find vacation homes, which was fueled by the Great Recession because people with second homes who were struggling to pay the mortgages and upkeep, figured out how to turn them into little piggy banks. HomeAway now has more than one million vacation rental listings.

The company raised almost $505 million in five funding rounds before it went public in 2011.

HomeAway says it currently features more than a million paid vacation rental home listings in 190 countries on its site. The company also owns a portfolio of other rental sites, including VRBO.com and VacationRental.com in the U.S., as well as similar sites in the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand. It also operates BedandBreakfast.com.

Anyhow, I imagine some of the company’s principals will be buying up some pretty fancy houses in Austin pretty soon!