Expedia Is Considering Ways to Introduce Sponsored Listings on Vrbo

09.04.2024 - 20:25 / skift.com / Dennis Schaal / Rob Torres

Sponsored listings on Expedia.com and Hotels.com are a “significant” portion of Expedia Group’s advertising business, and the company is considering ways to launch them for the first time on its vacation rental platform Vrbo, as well.

The lack of sponsored listings on Vrbo “is one of the big things I’d like to change,” said Rob Torres, senior vice president media & affiliate solutions at Expedia Group.

Torres made clear that Vrbo isn’t at the testing stage yet for sponsored listings, but he said they are “working on that as a product and a feature.”

Torres, who worked at Expedia from 1999 to 2006, returned to the company in 2022 after 16 years with Google. He now oversees advertising on the various Expedia Group brands, including Vrbo.

Torres said individual property owners and large property management companies have expressed interest in sponsored listing for short-term rentals on Vrbo. “It’s on our side to figure that out in my team and I am pushing them,” he said. “We’re smart enough, we have technology, we innovated, we have to figure it out.”

After the interview Monday, an Expedia spokesperson said the idea of launching TravelAds on Vrbo “is something Expedia Group is looking at. It isn’t in progress yet and is still in a nascent discovery phase only.”

Expedia Group currently lets hotels buy TravelAds and airlines purchase Flight Sponsored Listings, both of which enable them to boost the visibility of their listings for a cost per click on Expedia.com and Hotels.com.

Torres said there have been a number of recent changes to Expedia’s sponsored ads, which have been in existence for around two decades.

For example, Expedia recently launched automated bidding for these ad placements. The auction used to be solely a manual process and parts of it still are, Torres said. But now it is more automated and Expedia can inform the advertiser when its budget is running low, or how its sponsored listing is faring against the competition, he added.

Expedia already runs a limited amount of vacation rental sponsored listings on Expedia and Hotels.com, but not on Vrbo.

What’s changed for Vrbo is that it recently transitioned to a common backend tech platform with Expedia and Hotels.com. Torres said that enables Expedia Group to make available some of these sponsored ad features to Vrbo, but it’s complex because unlike a hotel room, a vacation rental property can have unique features and they generally don’t have the guest capacity that hotels have.

Asked about any differentiation between Expedia’s sponsored listings and that of the competition, Torres claimed that Expedia has more in-depth targeting capabilities, and has an advantage over Google, which doesn’t process many bookings.

“We have the full funnel,”