Online vacation-rental leader HomeAway broadened its reach and inventory mix with the purchase of BedandBreakfast.com for an undisclosed sum.

BedandBreakfast.com adds about 370,000 monthly unique visitors, according to Compete Inc., and about 10,000 inns to the HomeAway empire, which includes access to some 430,000 vacation rental properties across a bevy of domains, including HomeAway.com, VRBO.com, Homelidays.com and about a half-dozen others.

“As the theme of their Super Bowl ad and online video campaign has made clear, the largest player in the online vacation rental marketplace has set its competitive crosshairs squarely on hotels,” says Douglas Quinby, PhoCusWright senior director, research, and author of  ”Vacation Rental Marketplace: Poised for Change.”  ”This acquisition suggests that HomeAway is broadening their mission beyond vacation rentals to encompass more alternative leisure accommodation. Their marketing reach and in particular online marketing expertise should give a nice boost to an alternative category that is often overlooked, given the dominance of hotels in online travel.”

Quinby points out that HomeAway uses the high-margins listings model, which avoids the costs associated with transactions, fulfillment and customer support.

In that regard, HomeAway co-founder and CEO Brian Sharples says some innkeepers use BedandBreakfast.com technology for transactions, but the newly acquired business is listings-based at its core.

“Most of BedandBreakfast.com’s customers enjoy the ease of the the paid-listing model, just as the majority of HomeAway customers,” Sharples says. “The strength of the listing business at BedandBreakfast.com was one of the many attractive aspects of this business that made it a perfect fit for HomeAway.”

Expedia’s TripAdvisor, too, has a fledgling listings business in the form of TripAdvisor Business Listings for hotels, as well as vacation-rental listings through Expedia’s stake in FlipKey.

HomeAway’s acquisition of BedandBreakfast.com gets a little sticky because BedandBreakfast.com has distribution relationships for innkeepers with Expedia and Travelocity, although the two online travel agencies’ vacation-rental businesses are dimunitive when compared with HomeAway’s.

Expedia spokeswoman Katie Deines Fourcin says, “Our relationship with Bedandbreakfast.com is a supply agreement through which Expedia and Hotels.com offer Bedandbreakfast.com properties, and we don’t expect  HomeAway’s acquisition to have any impact on the agreement.”

Privately held HomeAway is rumored to be mulling an IPO, although the company denies anything is in the works at the moment.

Buying BedandBreakfast.com and broadening its inventory base, especially if HomeAway sticks with its listings model, is one approach to making investors more enthusiastic about a public offering, Quinby says.

Sharples of HomeAway says the company plans to operate BedandBreakfast.com as an independent brand, and he added that the acquired company’s 50 employees will not be subject to layoffs. [HomeAway has some 540 employees.]

Asked who HomeAway’s main competition is, Sharples doesn’t even mention any online travel agencies.

“On the supply side, HomeAway primarily competes with local or regional websites,” Sharples says. “On the demand side, we consider our biggest competitors to be branded hotels and resorts.”

And, that is what the BedandBreakfast.com acquisition is all about: giving consumers another lodging alternative to hotels and resorts.

Just ask the Griswolds.

Accommodation rental specialist giant HomeAway has moved quickly to deny suggestions that it will list on the public markets.

Expedia chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi told a conference in San Francisco yesterday that he expected the venture-backed company to go to the financial markets in 2010 or 2011.

The well-timed and very public statement came out of the blue in terms of adding a new name to the list of those travel and technology outfits expected to launch IPOs this year.

Nevertheless, HomeAway hit back quickly today with a short statement following Khosrowshahi’s comments.

An official says:

“We are extremely pleased with the success we have experienced to date, but there are no plans for an IPO at this moment in time.”

Those with a keen eye for language and sentence formation will note the “at this moment in time” element to the statement. The statement also refers to an IPO, rather than simply “going public”.

Khosrowshahi’s prediction may have been aimed at HomeAway for wider reasons – to draw attention to the company’s structure and financial position amid ongoing speculation that one of the big OTAs will take a look at some of the bigger players in the accommodation rental sector later this year in order to tap into the growing marketplace.

HomeAway released its 2009 annual report for the UK earlier today, boasting encouraging figures in terms of traffic, booking enquiries and sign-ups.

Operator of the HomeAway Holiday Rentals and Owners Direct brands in the UK, HomeAway says it is reporting 43% growth year-on-year in booking requests from 2008 to 2009.

Growth of  property listings has also jumped by 45% over the same period.

The good news is apparently a one-way street, according to European president Petra Friedmann

The company says it has been doubling its compound annual growth rate since 2005.

Much of the company’s growth has been secured due to its aggressive acquisition strategy in Europe, snapping up both Holiday Rentals and Owners Direct in recent years.

Traffic to the European sites, according to ComScore, are increasing by 65% year-on-year (2008 to 2009).

On a worldwide basis, HomeAway is reporting revenues of $120 million for the year ending 31 December 2009, with one third of the company’s revenues coming in from its European division.

The question for many will be what will the company do when the impressive growth rate begins slowing down?

Some suspect the growth runway is actually a pretty long one given that official reports (PhoCusWright study in 2008) put the US vacation rental marketplace alone at around $25 billion a year and unofficial estimates in Europe at around a similar figure.

Given the company’s foray into high profile marketing on TV recently it could be seen as an indicator that the company sees plenty of growth ahead.

So, even with a number of sizeable competitors, at least in the US, HomeAway appears to be pushing ahead regardless, consolidating businesses in regions such as Europe and rolling out its common branding and IT platform.

But as one close holiday rental watcher recently commented privately:

“HomeAway is like one of those perfect wines that is sitting in the cellar, waiting to be opened. It improves over time, but at some point the wine-tasters will be unable to wait any longer, knowing the bounty inside is sure to be good. What’s the betting it’ll be a big OTA that is preparing the corkscrew?”

The debut HomeAway ad for the US Super Bowl last night has won the praise of a marketing monitoring firm.

The highly competitive marketplace which takes place annual during the ad breaks is a fertile breeding ground for the US marketing community to slam or gush over the respective 30-second spots from some of the biggest brands in the country.

Reprise Media says the HomeAway ad, featuring Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo in a return to their classic roles as the Mr and Mrs Griswold from the National Lampoon comedies, was a “Touchdown” compared to other ads on show.

HomeAway joined Google, Boost Mobile, E-Trade and Honda as the only companies to take advantage of a wider off and online media schedule.

Reprise says:

“TV connected with search, landing these advertisers in the end zone!”

A recent Comscore report suggested nearly one in three (around 30 million) people were expected to log on to their computers during the match extravaganza.

Around 14% of the Super Bowl audience was expected to visit one of the advertiser’s websites as well.

Reprise says advertisers not making the most of a mixed-media strategy included Budweiser, Intel and Dockers.

In a statement, HomeAway says:

“Daily unique visitors to vacation rental website up by more than 500 percent on day following debut of movie trailer-style commercial featuring Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo reprising their roles as Clark and Ellen Griswold; one million incremental page views for website immediately following airing of ad.”

All of the excitement leading up to tonight’s Super Bowl has little to do with the gridiron and much to do with the advertisements.

That’s true, at least for some marketers.

Thus, John Battelle’s Searchblog reports that Google will break longstanding tradition and run a TV advertisement during tonight’s Super Bowl.

Battelle says this Parisian Love ad, which outlines how to “impress a French girl” through Google search, will be aired during the Indianapolis Colts-New Orleans Saints clash tonight, probably during the third quarter.

Battelle points out that Google CEO Eric Schmidt got the buzz going with this tweet yesterday: “Can’t wait to watch the Superbowl tomorrow. Be sure to watch the ads in the 3rd quarter (someone said “Hell has indeed frozen over.”)”

Hmmm. If Google’s advertisers follow Schmidt’s apparent lead, then perhaps they should set aside less money this year for text ads on Google, and consider putting a little more into harder-to-measure TV spots.

Microsoft, of course, has shelled out a lot of money since the Summer on Bing for TV and radio ads, and picked up a little market share.

Maybe Google wants to play a little smash-mouth football with little Bing.

As reported, Homeaway, the vacation-rental company,  appears to be the only travel dot-com with an ad in today’s Super Bowl, and it, too, is slated to run in the third quarter.

Here’s HomeAway’s Super Bowl ad. It was available several hours before the game.

For the record, Kayak, which has been running its “search one and done” ads during NFL games and elsewhere, says it won’t be running these ads during today’s Super Bowl.

At $2.6 million for a 30-second ad, who can blame them?

There’s much more to readying an advertisement for Sunday night’s Super Bowl than striking the optimum creative and branding themes: HomeAway, apparently the lone travel dot-com advertiser this year, invested some $1 million in new hardware to handle an anticipated spike in website traffic, the company says.

Here’s a taste of the campaign — not the actual ad — in this video from Austin News KXAN.com.

The ad itself won’t be publicized until the third quarter of the Super Bowl, but is known to revolve around all the mishaps that can supposedly take place at hotels — as opposed to the value and amenities that await the traveler at HomeAway’s favored vacation-rental sector.

The 30-second ad is said to resemble a movie trailer and will drive viewers to a HomeAway microsite, which features a 15-minute “Hotel Hell Vacation” film starring actors Beverly D’Angelo and Chevy Chase, who update their roles in the 1980s flick, “National Lampoon Vacation.”

The Super Bowl ad will subsequently be aired on the Travel Channel, the Discovery Channel, HGTV, TBS, USA Network and the Food Network.

It’s all part of Austin, Texas-based HomeAways first national soup-to-nuts, integrated marketing campaign, which kicks off with the Super Bowl ad.

Online advertising and social-media efforts also are part of the national campaign. Google and Yahoo will get online ads, as well as About.com, Concierge.com and iExplore, the company says.

The Chevy Chase character, Clark Griswold, already is equipped with Facebook pages and a Twitter account.

Matt Cohen, HomeAway’s director of global brand marketing, says buying a Super Bowl ad wasn’t an easy decision, with CBS reportedly asking for some $2.6 million for each 30-second ad.

Cohen says HomeAway studied the outcomes for past Super Bowl advertisers and was heartened that dot-com advertisers “seem to return year after year.”

He adds that HomeAway is in a strong financial condition and call the Super Bowl “perfect timing” as it falls within “the peak travel booking period.”

Hopefully, all of that $1 million in new hardware will hold up during the expected Web-traffic blitz.

And, then the challenge will be to engage a new, larger audience to ensure that the $1 million hardware investment was not for naught.

Holiday rental giant HomeAway has quadrupled its PR budget in the UK for 2010 to help engineer an initiative to send two bloggers around the world for the rest of 2010.

The company has hired well known travel writer Lara Dunston and partner/photographer Terence Carter to spend their time staying in rented villas in 24 locations around the world, in return for blogging about their experiences.

HomeAway Holiday Rentals, the UK division of the global HomeAway brand, has paid for the couple’s travel and accommodation for the duration of the project (”plus a fee”) and given them free reign to write whatever they like about the properties the duo stay in.

The project, known as Gran Tourismo, follows similar efforts – see Best Job campaign – to spread a brand’s message and products in off-kilter ways into corners of the web already teaming with travel content.

HomeAway admits the project could be a tricky one to manage if Dunston and Carter decide a particular property doesn’t come up to scratch, especially as owners are paying to feature on its listings pages.

An official says:

“If Lara and Terence are pointing out things that are a problem [for a property] then in some ways it is down to the owner to improve it.”

HomeAway insists the pair have complete editorial freedom during the trip – something it says is risky but is outweighed by its desire to push for honesty rather than “advertorial fluff”.

Gran Tourismo is a major step for a company such as HomeAway – until now it has put almost all its online marketing and PR efforts into keyword buying and SEO.

The huge increase in PR spend in order to run the project signifies a wider move by travel firms to utilise social media and well known figures on the travel blogging circuit to help with a wider branding strategy.

Dunston and Carter, HomeAway says, have agreed to a minimum level of content on the Gran Tourismo sites during their jaunt around the world, including “keeping up interaction” on social networks.

The pair are also free to continue taking commissions from other travel publications, officials say.

The fail-safe for all parties: there is a get-out clause after one month if things do not work out.

NB: Good interview with Carter here.

HomeAway is plotting the next phase of its quest for world domination with a gradual rebranding of its sites around the globe.

Sites such as the UK’s Holiday Rentals, which was acquired by HomeAway in 2007, have seen a makeover in recent weeks to push the HomeAway branding to the forefront.

Other sites are expected to follow suit in the coming months as HomeAway slowly pulls all the acquired brands under one corporate roof.

Supporting the rebranding campaign in Europe will be a ongoing marketing campaign, possibly including what may be its first foray into TV advertising outside of the US.

HomeAway is a tough talker and says the enormous growth potential in the holiday rentals space is not being realised by other players in the industry – especially the online travel agencies.

Petra Friedmann, ex-general manager for Opodo France who was recently installed as president for HomeAway in Europe, says the European marketplace alone is now worth around £25-30 billion in annual rental revenue.

In the UK it is estimated to be £2-£4 billion a year, while a PhoCusWright report in 2008 plotted the US market at roughly $24 billion.

Friedmann, parroting HomeAway CEO and holiday rental evangelist Brian Sharples, believes the marketplace is only at the beginning of a major increase in accessibility, innovation and – most perhaps interestingly – acceptance by others as a credible part of the industry.

Web traffic across HomeAway’s global brands increased by 48% between September 2008 and September 2009. Revenue growth for the company is so far running at around 35-40% for 2009.

Friedmann says OTAs are not capable of turning their attention to the holiday rental market because “it is a completely different job”.

This may, of course, be a smokescreen to dissuade those from eyeing the obvious booty on offer from taking it too seriously.

[Friedmann admits that during her time at Opodo her team "looked at the rentals market"]

Interestingly, Sharples told me in 2008 that there was nothing to stop HomeAway from introducing its own OTA-merchant model.

When asked how this is working out, Friedmann says:

“We are doing tests with some property management owners. There is still some work to do to make it an intelligent solution because it is so much more complex.”

There, once again, the boundaries between the two disciplines are being drawn – this is our domain, you stick with yours.

But it seems incredible to many that with travel technology, distribution switches and software able to run complex tour operating platforms and airline reservation and bookings systems, online travel agencies and others are unable or unwilling to tap into such a burgeoning market.