Nobody knows where your bookings actually come from better than the OTAs themselves. So when Vrbo's VP of Marketing, Helen Melluish, sat down for an interview to discuss how the platform is spending its summer marketing budget, I paid attention.
It's a rare look under the hood at how Vrbo is pulling in the guests who end up booking our properties.
Three things stood out when I read between the lines of what she was saying
#1 They're leaning into drive-to trips
She said it flat out:
"Drive-to is actually a big part of our business anyway."
Especially as gas and flights get pricey, Vrbo is shifting its ad budget toward the closer-to-home routes:
"We're also seeing some other travel routes or priority corridors open up that are a little bit more drive time. In that regard, we're changing some of our local messaging and media strategy to make sure we're talking about those destinations."
So Vrbo is openly saying drive-to destinations are core to the business, and they're buying ads to push the trips people can take without booking a flight, targeting guests by where they live:
"we understand where the key origin and destination markets are... And we're able to market at quite a local level. So we will do marketing in certain origin cities—maybe it’s Atlanta or New York... Often they have their annual vacation in the same place, and we know that trip is still going to take place."
Basically, if your property sits within a few hours' drive of a major metro, you're in the kind of destination Vrbo is spending real money to promote this summer.
#2 Vrbo’s “brand promise”
When she talked about how Vrbo sets itself apart, the same three words kept coming up:
"we want to make sure you realize when you book a Vrbo, it's going to absolutely deliver for you. It's going to be quality. You can trust the experience you're going to have." And she went on to say "that we are very focused on trust and quality and reliability in the space."
I’m speculating here because nobody knows how Vrbo's search algorithm actually works, but here's my bet:
If a company is pouring tons of money into telling the world it stands for reliability, it can't afford to send a guest to a host who cancels at the last minute. So my bet is that their search algorithm punishes hosts who cancel on guests harder than you'd expect.
That's a guess. But it lines up with how a brand protects its reputation.
#3 How they're using AI, and where they won't
This one made me laugh a little. When asked about AI, she drew a hard line:
"the houses we feature are always going to be real Vrbos—we're not going to start creating AI homes."
I mean, sure. "We promise not to use AI to invent fake houses for our ads" is a low bar. But the fact that it needs saying out loud tells you exactly where the marketing industry is heading.
So what are they actually using AI for? Speed and scale:
"maybe it's a billboard that was never really a billboard, but is a billboard that exists in our organic social. We can generate something pretty quickly using AI and be in the moment socially with something that feels culturally relevant, for example."
So the play is fast, culturally-relevant social posts. But it's interesting where they drew the line. The marketing can be fake, but the product can't be.
What to take away
We don't usually get to hear about how one of the biggest players in our industry is thinking about marketing right now. Leaning into drive-to trips, positioning the brand on trust, and testing where AI helps without letting it touch the actual product are good nuggets that are worth applying to our own properties.
If you run your own marketing, it's good to know what the big players are doing (so you can to take this info and use it for yourself… or do the opposite of what Vrbo’s doing to stand out).
And if you don't do any marketing yourself and just list your properties on the OTAs, pay even closer attention. Because this is what you're paying the OTA fees for. The ads, the data, the local targeting. It's the machine that fills your calendar, and it's worth understanding how it actually runs.
Further reading
