Vrbo: Product Management & Education
The company…
Most of us are familiar with Vrbo, part of Expedia Group, one of the largest online travel agencies (OTA) globally.
The challenge…
Vrbo as a double-sided marketplace wants to provide value to both property managers and guests so they keep coming back.
Revenue management allows you to increase revenue for owners while simultaneously providing better rates and availability to guests.
However, staff didn’t have a deep understanding of vacation rental revenue management and neither did their clients.
The Method …
First, we wanted to better understand property managers listing that listed on the site. After over 700 responses, we were able to clearly identify the top two priorities:
Develop and deliver revenue management education to internal teams so that they could comfortably have revenue conversations.
Enhance the functions and capabilities of MarketMaker to drive engagement and revenue
The Result…
With a combination of industry experience, engineering know how, and product management, the results speak for themselves:
Educational content, both internal and external facing, taught revenue management fundamentals and had a 98% satisfaction rate.
Using data gathered from the survey, user calls, and industry experts, a pilot program was launched to test dynamic pricing in MarketMaker … and it worked. Those in the pilot increased revenue by 29% over the control.
The impact on MarketMaker was outstanding. All year-end user metric targets were met in the first quarter. By the third quarter, those metrics had surpassed the year-end target for the following year!