HomeAway, Inc., is an Austin, Texas–based vacation rental company. Its website, HomeAway.com, serves as a marketplace for more than half a million vacation rental home listings all over the world. Earlier this month, that number rose with the acquisition of an Australian-based vacation rental company, signaling continued improvement for the vacation rental industry.

The site realholidays.com.au, which features 21,000 listings in Australia, was previously owned by REA Group, a Melbourne–based company specializing in online advertising for real estate websites. Before the acquisition, realholidays.com.au catered primarily to Australian travelers. Now that HomeAway has purchased the business, the new owners look to add Australian customers to its client lists and bring existing clients to Australian vacation homes.

In a statement released earlier this month, HomeAway CEO Brian Sharples said, “Australia is a tremendous travel marketplace, and HomeAway is excited to continue the work begun by REA Group to provide even greater choice to Australian travelers. We look forward to working with the realholidays.com.au customers to help them benefit from our technology and the marketing of their properties to a new, global market of vacation rental travelers.”

While the vacation rental market hasn’t recovered from the recent recession quite as quickly as the hotel market, possibly because of its focus on leisure travel, the industry has been cautiously optimistic about the outlook for 2011 and beyond. HomeAway’s recent expansion seems to indicate that business is, at least for one major player, picking up.

Related posts:
Vacation Rental Market Following in Hotel Footsteps, Almost
PhoCusWright Analyst Forum—Vacation Rentals Moving From Real Estate to Travel

Spartanburg, SC based Extended Stay Inc. finally exited a very messy and painful bankruptcy with the announcement of its $3.925 billion acquisition by an investment group consisting of Centerbridge Partners, Paulson & Co and Blackstone Real Estate Partners VI.

Extended Stay

The bankruptcy court had the herculean task of untangling the conflicting interests of the company, creditors, junior lenders, investors and bank lenders including Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Wachovia and Bear Stearns (represented by the Federal Reserve after Bear’s demise).

The whole saga was made even more sordid by multiple lawsuits between the company’s junior lenders and its bank lenders, and a court-sponsored investigation into the original $8 billion buyout and subsequent bankruptcy.

Blackstone’s association with Extended Stay goes all the way back to 2004, when it bought the company in a $3.13 billion deal. Blackstone then sold off Extended Stay to David Lichtenstein’s Lightstone Group LLC in June 2007 for $8 billion. It took just two years and the subprime mortgage crisis to force Extended Stay into bankruptcy in June 2009.

And now three years after selling it, Blackstone gets it back again for $3.9 billion. A spokesman for the investor group said in a statement that “After reducing its debt burden by nearly $5 billion, Extended Stay will have the flexibility to improve its customer experience and offerings.”

The only good thing about the whole mess was that it didn’t affect the operations of the 685 Extended Stay hotels which continue to operate without facing any closures or mass layoffs. It also highlights the fact that the problems of the last three years have nothing much to do with the hotel industry, and a lot to do with greed on Wall Street and in the real estate sector.

Gary DeLapp, president and CEO of HVM, L.L.C., the separately owned company that manages the hotels throughout the U.S. and Canada, said “I am particularly grateful to our associates, suppliers and travel partners for their support during this process, especially in light of the difficult circumstances in which we and the entire industry have been operating.”

He added that HVM would continue to manage the portfolio of 685 properties despite the change in ownership, and that the company’s near-term capital plan includes significant investment in major property improvements and renovations.

Photo – Ealden Escañan

Related posts:-

Federal Reserve Feeling Heat Over $900m Extended Stay Debt

On July 8, 2010, San Francisco, CA based social travel recommendations site Nextstop announced that it had been acquired by Facebook. Facebook intends to shut down Nextstop by September this year.

Facebook Nextstop

In a statement on their website, the Nextstop founders say that “What this means is that we’ll be joining Facebook and that Facebook has bought most of our assets… but we believe it’s an opportunity for some of the ideas behind nextstop to reach Facebook’s audience of more than 400 million users and have a much bigger impact on the world than we could on our own.”

Nextstop was officially launched in June 2009, and offers short user-posted recommendations of businesses and locations, along with photos, maps and other information. Nextstop’s search tool uses the 100,000 social recommendations it has in its database for showing results for over 1000 cities from around the world.

Since the site will be shutdown in September, Nextstop will be releasing its database of places and recommendations under a Creative Commons license over the next few weeks. Users who uploaded recommendations to Nextstop are being asked to export and save their contributions to Picasa or Google Maps.

Nextstop co-founders Adrian Graham and Carl Sjogreen are Google alumni. Graham helped launch Google Groups and Picasa, while Sjogreen was involved with Google Calendar.

This means that the acquisition has as much to do with the Nextstop Founders’ background with product launches at Google, as it has to do with social travel recommendations. It’s not even clear if they’ll be working on something similar to Nextstop at Facebook. According to Techcrunch, the Nextstop founders will be working as product managers at Facebook under Facebook’s product director Blake Ross.

Blake Ross himself is an acquisition hire who came with Parakey’s acquisition in 2007, as is Facebook CTO Bret Taylor who came with the Friendfeed acquisition last year and has 4 years of experience launching over 25 products for Google. 

In addition to Nextstop, Friendfeed and Parakey, recent Facebook acquisition hires include ShareGrove, Divvyshot and Octazen Solutions.

Palo Alto, CA based online travel guide Ruba (ruba.com) has been acquired by Google and the Ruba team will be moving into Google Headquarters next week.

Ruba

The announcement was made by Ruba on their company blog, which says “Hi friends, fans, and Ruba community members – exciting news from the Ruba team. We are thrilled to announce our team will be joining Google!  As of Monday, May 24, we’ll be moving into the Google headquarters.”

Google has confirmed the acquisition, as per TechCrunch. How much Google paid for Ruba has not been disclosed.

Ruba was founded in 2008 as a user generated travel guide site by Mike Cassidy and Arnaud Weber. Members of Ruba can build and maintain their own guides as well as explore guides from similarly-minded travelers and professional tours added by tour operators.

CEO Mike Cassidy explains that ”I believe that it’s dramatically easier to gauge the travel personality of a reviewer when I can see a crisp collection of her favorite places. Once I’ve found an author I like, I’m really curious to see all the places around the world that she really likes.”

Tour operators receive profiles on Ruba where they can promote their tours. Visitors to Ruba.com have a choice of over 3,000 tours from industry leading tour operators.

Ruba has built up an enthusiastic community and fan following on social media networks, helped along by tight integration between the site, twitter, facebook and Google Maps.

Other than Ruba, Mike Cassidy has been the Co-Founder and CEO of three previous start-ups: Xfire, Direct Hit, and Stylus Innovation. The other Ruba co-founder Arnaud Weber was most recently a technical lead on the Chrome Browser at Google.

As for why Google has acquired Ruba, Google apparently plans to integrate Ruba into iGoogle, their personalized home page product.

While this news is sure to generate a few ripples in the travel industry as one more step in Google’s foray into the travel industry (City Tours, Hotel Price Display, and a possible ITA Software acquisition), the Ruba acquisition by and itself shouldn’t be given too much weight in this regard.