Today, Fairfax announced that The Stayz Group has acquired YesBookit, the leading holiday rental booking system for property managers. Developed by Midac Technologies, YesBookit integrates with Stayz, Rentahome, HomeAway and Wotif to simplify the holiday booking process for Australian and New Zealand property managers.
YesBookit enables instant bookings and online transactions with credit card payments going directly into agents’ accounts. It currently has 170 clients and 14,000 holiday rental properties that are bookable online.
Justin Butterworth has been appointed General Manager of YesBookit, bringing more than 12 years of online holiday rental experience to the business. Justin said:
“This acquisition enables The Stayz Group to offer a more sophisticated booking system for property managers. Using YesBookit property managers will benefit from greater efficiency, more bookings and an enhanced customer experience.
“Holiday rental guests will benefit from more choice of bookable accommodation with accurate availability, pricing and an online payment option”
The YesBookit team will continue to operate as an independent business unit within Fairfax Media and the founders will continue to be actively involved in the business going forward. Future YesBookit developments include usability improvements, support and training, mobile applications and portal distribution.
Kevin Johnson Bade, Managing Director of Midac said,
“YesBookit was the first online application holiday rentals booking management system and with the help of our ‘family’ of clients we continue as industry leaders. Our team is really excited by the possibilities that the Stayz resources open up. We have many new developments in the pipeline and we will continue to deliver market-leading support and training for customers.”
This purchase follows the acquisition of the Occupancy Pty Ltd by Fairfax last year and strengthens their position as the dominant player in this space in Australia.
8 Comments
Geoff
Do you know what the price was?
Ryan O'Grady
The price is undisclosed at this point in time but I’m sure someone will leak it!
vic Del Vecchio
I wonder if they will integrate the yesbookit listings into their Stayz site. Would make sense if they did.
Ryan O'Grady
I think they would certainly push that along with the other holiday sites they own. But it would come down to whether the landlords would be prepared to pay the Stayz fees.
Glenn
The word has been that this sale has been hovering for a while now. Yesbookit made presentations at the recent Stayz conference. The purchase follows the trend of the USA where Homeaway purchased 3 property reservations and management softwares to strengthen their product to have greater control over this huge marketplace.
This all comes 1 week after Wotif announced that they are increasing commissions by 1% ( that’s a 10% rise ) this year and a further 1% next year.
Maybe the next move will be from Wotif, they are trying to get into the holiday rental market but without a great deal of success. Now that Stayz have tightened their grip on the Yesbookit users they too will begin the inevitable increase of commissions charged to property owners and managers.
vic Del Vecchio
The holiday rental market managed by RE property managers sits on Yesbookit. I mentioned above that it would make sense to integrate these listings into Stayz. However, on reflection how would this work? Stayz charges a commission for their pocket, do they charge the Agent managed listings a commission and agents then charge their commission?
Seems like agents are not going to be happy about this sale to Stayz unless they can be convinced that their share of the pie is not being diminished. There will definitely be a threat to their management rights if the accommodation owners feel the squeeze……. why shouldn’t/wouldn’t they then go direct to Stayz ? ……….just saying.
Mac
YesBookit is a very clunky, old-fashioned system. Agents currently gain next to no benefit in advertising on YesBookit. It is a holiday listings CMS. YesBookit will no doubt now offer an ‘upgrade’ of existing listings to be advertised on Stayz, thus value-adding their service…..at a cost. Agents could now consider going direct to Stayz but if they are currently doing fine out of the existing arrangement the only attraction might be to go somewhere that has a better CMS offering – without paying 3% commish on top of their ‘annual’ fees, (Nice work if you can get it!!)
Glenn
As someone who ditched Yesbookit 3 years ago… love the ” very clunky, old fashioned system” there is more conversation on this at HRMA page LinkedIn.