HomeAway is partnering up with Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment on a new daytime TV show that will premier on A&E Network on Dec. 9.
It's called "Vacation Rental Potential." In it, the show's host, Holly Baker, will walk viewers through the process of finding the right price, location and design with prospective property buyers who are looking at vacation properties. Then, the prospective buyers will work with current HomeAway vacation rental owners and other industry experts to set up a plan to maximize their return on investment.
The first episode features a family looking for a retirement home on the Jersey Shore, and the show is expected to visit Park City, Utah, and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in future segments.
HomeAway, an Austin company that was acquired by Expedia in 2015, has a wide variety of content. It brought on actor Nick Offerman to narrate one of its TV ads last year, and it built an Apple TV app to provide concierge services on the screen for property owners to offer their rental guests. But the series on A&E appears to represent company's biggest and most product-focused effort on cable TV.
“Vacation rentals are the fastest growing category in the entire travel industry,” Kristen Nolte, HomeAway senior vice president of brand and integrated marketing, said in a news release. “More and more people each year love staying in these incredible homes, and the show illustrates how the dream of owning a vacation home is possible by making money renting to travelers.”
The market for vacation rentals has expanded so much that you can pretty easily justify a wide variety of content around how to rent out premium vacation properties and make money off of it.
And vacation rentals have several key elements of good video content: beautiful locations, interesting properties, money and people. And, from HomeAway's perspective, it's a great marketing play that puts their brand in front of a ton of people who may not have considered short-term rentals as a way to finance their vacation or retirement home.
Getting in front of a TV audience also has the side benefit of giving the property owners featured on the show a way to market their properties to viewers, who can rent the properties featured on the show.
