Vrbo Marketing Strategy Paper Wyatt Clarence Kramer Melissa Quezada Jeremy Ethan Cheng Faith Marie Rogers Melanie Desiree Armenta California Baptist University MKT 333- Principles of Marketing Professor Roston Willis 3 December 2023 Authors Note First paragraph: Vrbo’s Marketing Strategy and Results- Wyatt Kramer Second paragraph: Vrbo’s Market & Various Segments Targeted- Melissa Quezada Third paragraph: Vrbo’s Strong Suites & Areas of Improvement- Jeremy Cheng Fourth paragraph: Vrbo’s Strategy- Faith Rogers & Melanie Armenta Vrbo 1 (1.) VRBO has a distinct marketing strategy. They are trying to focus on getting each customer with the property that fits them the best. It is typically geared towards middle/high class family & friends that want to book a large entire home. Vrbo has done this through their massive amount of commercials mostly shown to consumers via Youtube. These commercials make the viewers feel that the family/friends in the commercial are right where they each want to be. It portrays the idea that even though there are multiple generations, the location that they are in is perfect for everyone. This is different from their largest competitor: Airbnb. Airbnb focuses mostly on small families. Their advertisements usually consist of a group or family of three people. VRBO is geared towards larger numbers of people. Vrbo does not so much care about the quantity of listings/rentals they get. They are more worried about the quality of their listings. “Vrbo does not care about getting the most listings. It wants the ones that are the best for its target consumers,” (Masson). They want to ensure that each and every customer leaves with a smile on their face. Vrbo has been successful. Through these market campaigns mostly via youtube, they have done overall pretty well. Expedia owns Vrbo, just simply looking at the stock, it has been on an uptrend. Vrbo was able to pump the market full of a lot of marketing and advertising. This was successful in the end and has continued to have steady growth as a company. This growth and advertising is not only worldwide either. They are currently in over 190 Countries. Vrbo has been successful, and I believe they will continue to be successful. As of now, it does not look like anything is standing in their way. Vrbo 2 (2.) As previously mentioned, VRBO markets their listings to families or groups of friends. Throughout the website, they make this apparent by showing multiple pictures of either families or groups of friends in various places. In their section, “Get to know Vrbo,” they have a picture of a family at the top, and they go on to list their mission, followed by a brief explanation of just how important family is to them. This catches the attention of clients who are looking for potential family getaways. While it may seem simple, Vrbo has paid attention to its demographics and typical clientele. When looking at Vrbo’s demographics on Similar Web, we see that one of the most prominent groups of interest is people between the ages of 45-54, followed by people between the age of 35-44. Additionally, taking the gender percentages into account, females at 58.3% and males at 41.7%, we understand why Vrbo chooses family as their most vital selling point. Typically, women in the age range mentioned above hold family values at the top of their list. By advertising family values and the importance of togetherness, Vrbo calls those people in left and right. Regarding marketing, Vrbo tends to be more successful through word of mouth since their highest market channel is their website directly, at 53.32%. (Similar Web) We see much smaller numbers when looking at the attention coming from social media at 1.66% and display at 2.73%. This does not come as a surprise when considering that the majority of their clientele is between the ages of 35-54; this age group does not typically have social media, which explains the drastic difference in percentages. Vrbo 3 (3.) So in light of this information, what conclusions can be made on the performance and quality of Vrbo’s marketing strategies? It’s very apparent that the company knows its target demographic, abundantly spreading information that helps connect people who they think are interested in their service. As mentioned before, Vrbo’s most recent online ad campaign titled “Only your people” does exceptionally well at emphasizing their target market’s need for privacy when renting a home. Within the campaign, they take the qualities of therapeutic music, diverse images, and captivating words to compile an appealing advertisement that covers a multitude different segments in one go. Whether you're with family, friends, or someone special, Vrbo presents it so that if you chose to book a home with them, any plans you’ve made would go smoothly without any outside interruptions. However, even if Vrbo is good in their appeal to those with strong relational and familial values there is quite literally a price to be paid for such a strong emphasis on that particular market. For all Vrbo's success with appealing to families and friends, it struggles to address the financially conscious who may find value in its pricing. Lancefield in his comparative study found that hotels tend to be generally cheaper among housing rental services, especially through other countries. He found that hotels in Greece, the UK, and the Netherlands had financial advantages ranging from 58-85% between venues. In addition, refund policies vary from place to place depending on the homeowner; such information is rarely addressed in their advertisements. Vrbo isn’t in the deepest of water however. It’s tendency to aim at large groups assist in creating value for such an expensive purchase, as most people would prefer the abundance of Vrbo 4 space provided by Vrbo’s selection of housing. However, it wouldn’t be harmful to add some sort of financial appeal to consumers. (4.) Through Vrbo’s strategy to market to family and friends, they can help big groups travel by offering large vacation homes tailored to each group and their specific needs. With their slogan, “Where families travel better together,” they offer a safe space for families and groups to bond together and relax in community. Therefore, their marketing strategy has successfully targeted their market and utilized campaigns and branding to focus on their familial market (Garcia). During the pandemic, Vrbo implemented strategies to continue their business by posing their vacation homes as families coming together, being finally united under one roof again. As the travel season restarted in 2021, their strategy in changing their tagline in their YouTube ads from “travel better together” to “your together awaits” illustrated their adaption to the modern changes in society. Additionally, author Thibault Masson explains in his article, “Vrbo commercials reveal its clear focus on family vacation rentals,” that Vrbo successfully targeted the market’s want to resume safe travel once again (Masson). Thus resulting in Vrbo maintaining their sales within the shifting economy. Although Vrbo has been very successful in its marketing strategy to target families and large groups by uniting them through their vacation experience, Vrbo can improve its marketing strategy by making the users’ booking experience more personal and marketing it as a personalized booking process to fit every need. Although the booking experience is positioned as “instant booking,” it lacks personalization within the booking process. Instead, Vrbo could attract and target more families by implementing strategies such as previous booking history or a Vrbo 5 chatbot to answer questions about preferences or housing styles during the booking process. They can use these improvements and market these strategies as a personalized experience for family and friends to seek comfort, convenience, and familiarity within their booking process. Another form that VRBO could improve on their marketing actions is by focusing on fostering stronger connections with both property owners and travelers. This could involve personalized marketing campaigns, loyalty programs, or incentives to encourage repeat bookings. With this also including the form of the target market by expanding geographic expansion byIdentifying emerging markets and strategicallyexpanding into those regions could help VRBO increase its global footprint. Targeting regions with high tourism potential but lower competition might offer growth opportunities. This will help VRBO grow and have a higher potential of targeting other tourists with more opportunities to expand. It is important for VRBO to build a loyal community and having features that stand out from different communities to bring more attention to VRBO. Therefore creating a sense of community among users by facilitating forums, user-generated content, or social media engagement could foster trust and enhance the overall user experience. emphasizing unique features or exclusive property listings could help VRBO stand out in a crowded market. Highlighting diverse and unconventional accommodations or providing niche offerings could attract a larger community, even bring others from a different community to be a part of VRBO. Overall VRBO has historically been recognized for its effective marketing strategies that have contributed to its success in the vacation rental industry, but these are some concepts that may improve VRBO marketing even more. Vrbo 6 References About cancellation policy options. Vrbo. (n.d.). https://help.vrbo.com/articles/What-are-the-cancellation-policy-options Get to know Vrbo. Vrbo. (n.d.). https://www.vrbo.com/about/ Lancefield, Neil . "‘Surprising’ study finds hotels generally cheaper than Airbnb".The Independent(United Kingdom),September 16, 2023 Saturday. advance-lexis-com.libproxy.calbaptist.edu/api/document?collection=news&id=urn: contentItem:6960-7J51-JBNF-W20S-00000-00&context=1516831. Accessed December 1, 2023. Masson https://www.rentalscaleup.com/author/thibault-masson/, T. (2021, November 17).Vrbo 2022 strategy: Focus on large families, more listings on Expedia and hotels.com: Rental scale. Up Masson, Thibault. “Vrbo Commercials Reveal Its Clear Focus on Family Vacation Rentals: Rental Scale.”Rental Sscale-Up, 20 Oct. 2020. www.rentalscaleup.com/vrbo-family-vacation-rentals/. Vrbo.com traffic analytics, ranking stats & tech stack | similarweb. Similar Web. (2023, October). https://www.similarweb.com/website/vrbo.com/