Tripping.com, a search engine for long-term rental properties, has secured $16 million in new funding to build out its one-stop shop for vacation homes.
While a variety of hotel booking platforms, as well as Airbnb, have the short-term vacation rental space covered, Tripping is geared toward longer trips, with an average stay of just over a week.
Steadfast Venture Capital led the Series B round, joined by Asia-focused funds 7 Seas Venture Partners, Enspire Capital and Azure Capital, along with a handful of angels, including Fritz Demopoulos, who founded Chinese travel giant Qunar, Erik Blachford, the former CEO of Expedia, and former NFL player Shawntae Spencer.
Tripping offers users access to over 5 million property listings in 100,000 destinations worldwide by aggregating inventory from listing sites like VRBO, Homeaway and Booking.com.
“Historically the way this would work is you’d find a vacation rental online, you’d email the host, and you’d show up with a check in hand,” says Tripping founder and CEO Jen O’Neal. “Now you can do all of that online, but on average a traveler will go to at least five sites to book a vacation home.”
Launched in 2011, Tripping has seen a recent spike in revenue and growth. O’Neal says that the company brought in more revenue in the first seven weeks of 2015 than in all of last year combined, and this year it’s on track to do over $150 million in gross bookings.
According to O’Neal, the vacation industry is a $100 billion global market, but the top four rental booking sites — Homeaway, Priceline, TripAdvisor and Airbnb — only have about 22 percent market share.
“It’s insane because everyone thinks those brands are so massive, but it’s clear that there’s a ton of fragmentation in the market,” says O’Neal.
Tripping will use the funding to aggressively expand into international markets, specifically Asia, and to work on integrating listings from a queue of over a hundred partners.
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