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Worldwide: Online travel agency Tripadvisor has announced that it has made a “strategic” decision to transition its vacation rental strategy to a new business model that leverages third-party providers, in line with its existing hotels model, although it denied that it was shutting down its rental offering altogether.
The Telegraph reported on Tuesday [10 September] that the travel website, widely known for its reviews, travel guides and price comparisons, had emailed tenants, owners and hosts earlier in the day that it would no longer honour reservations after 1 November.
In a statement, a Tripadvisor spokesperson said: “Tripadvisor has decided to discontinue the direct booking and management of vacation rentals on its platform. This strategic shift aligns vacation rentals with our existing hotels offering and ensures the best experience for our customers.”
The spokesperson added that “vacation rental bookings hosted by Tripadvisor that have a check in date on or after 1st November 2024 will be cancelled and travellers will receive full refunds”. They said that all bookings affected by the change had already been addressed and that all impacted customers had been notified.
As per the company’s traveller support resources page, vacation rental bookings will be cancelled on 12 September [Thursday] and full refunds will be processed back to the original form of payment.
In the email sent out to tenants, owners and hosts, recipients were told that Tripadvisor would no longer contract directly with homeowners or enable bookings on the Tripadvisor or Holiday Lettings platform, and instead, it would lean into its existing hotels model by displaying rental properties brought by partners where customers can click off to complete their bookings on third-party sites. Tripadvisor also confirmed that it had decided to close its Flipkey and Niumba sites.
Users took to social media to air their frustrations, with one person on X [formerly Twitter] saying that owners had not been informed of the change prior to receiving the email from Tripadvisor. Others said that the cancellations would cause issues for those who had already made flight and vehicle hire arrangements and payments, while some asked for refunds for cancelled bookings.
Since 2008, Tripadvisor had embarked on a spree of holiday rental booking website acquisitions, including Flipkey [2008], Holiday Lettings [2010], Niumba [2013], VacationHomeRentals [2014] and Housetrip [2016], to take on established rivals such as Airbnb.
There had been rumours since 2020 that Tripadvisor was seeking to sell its vacation rental businesses, which were said to only constitute less than ten per cent of the company’s overall revenue. It reportedly appointed bankers to find potential buyers for its brands, although those efforts were unsuccessful.
At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the company announced that it would lay off 900 employees — accounting for almost 25 per cent of its global workforce at the time.
Then in February of this year, the travel website revealed that it had formed a special committee to explore proposals for a potential sale of the company to Liberty TripAdvisor, an entity created in 2014 upon the spin off of Tripadvisor from Liberty Interactive. Liberty TripAdvisor already owns a 21 per cent stake controlling stake in the website.
In a company statement, Tripadvisor said that the committee of independent directors from its board would be able to “evaluate any proposals that may be brought forward for a potential transaction in response to a recent Liberty TripAdvisor Holding disclosure of its intent to evaluate potential alternatives involving LTRP and Tripadvisor”.
In May, Tripadvisor said that no acceptable offer had come forward in order to proceed with a proposed sale.
At the end of trading yesterday, Tripadvisor’s share price had dropped to a record low of $13.11 on the Nasdaq, having gone public back in 2011, although shares recovered slightly on Wednesday morning.
According to The Telegraph, Tripadvisor has told shareholders that it will prioritise other areas of its business, over its accommodation division, including travel experiences website Viator, which it purchased ten years ago. In addition, it was revealed that the company had set aside $10 million [£7.7 million] to settle an unspecified “regulatory matter” relating to its rental collection.
