This is very interesting, especially the part about the keynote. That said, I disagree with this point:
> It's actually obscene that we were paying over $100k per year to HomeAway for platinum listings and then users on a basic listing were being ranked higher than us because they had "Book in Now" enabled on their properties. This is all because transparently, they need the bookings to be processed through their system to prove they are a valuable purchase for Expedia. (It's been no secret that everyone has known it's going to be Expedia buying HA).
Having used HomeAway / VRBO before, this seems like the sensible approach. Instant booking provides a much better experience for the user - I don't want to have to email a bunch of places to determine which are available. They definitely should be ranking these higher than other listings.
Indeed, that's a lot of money to spend for no benefit. If you let people pay to adjust search order it's always a conflict of interest, though. It's just that in this case, they preferred the little customer (who pays for the bookings) instead of the big customer.
> It's actually obscene that we were paying over $100k per year to HomeAway for platinum listings and then users on a basic listing were being ranked higher than us because they had "Book in Now" enabled on their properties. This is all because transparently, they need the bookings to be processed through their system to prove they are a valuable purchase for Expedia. (It's been no secret that everyone has known it's going to be Expedia buying HA).
Having used HomeAway / VRBO before, this seems like the sensible approach. Instant booking provides a much better experience for the user - I don't want to have to email a bunch of places to determine which are available. They definitely should be ranking these higher than other listings.