John Kim, who joined vacation-rental service HomeAway as chief commerce officer early this year, will succeed co-founder Brian Sharples as the company's CEO in January. Kim, 45, had worked for HomeAway parent Expedia for more than four years, most recently serving as the OTA's chief product officer. He spoke with hotels editor Danny King last month at the Phocuswright Conference in Los Angeles.
Q: What's changed at HomeAway since Expedia's acquisition last December?
A: We had really focused on the business model changes, and now we're focused more on the user experience: the traveler, the owner, making sure we resolve their issues one by one and make the right technology investment so that we can radically improve the experience.
Q: How will your leadership approach be different than that of Brian Sharples?
John Kim
A: What may make me different is user-experience first. Our products and properties are amazing, and if we just have a good user experience on both ends, we'd have an electric company. We built a feature where everything you look at, we automatically store it and make it available. So that's one example where you can say the consumer just feels so much relief. They can just shop and look for things, and not spend a lot of time writing things down. By getting that out of the way, you can dramatically increase the properties you see per sitting.
Q: Has HomeAway benefitted from Airbnb taking on the legal challenges facing the home-based accommodations sector?
A: The whole category has been villainized. Some regulation is good because you do want safe neighborhoods, but to say [vacation rentals] are a source of housing shortages is far-fetched; there's no real data to prove that. Airbnb is getting more than its fair share of the blame for that because they're the most popular and well known, but we're equally affected by it when people make really shortsighted decisions on whether or not this industry benefits their particular community. Most of the things that are being proposed are really about curbing the entire industry vs. how to safely do it so that it's beneficial for the overall community, or how to track local commerce stimulation. How do you benefit from the fact that you might actually encourage developers to build more housing? There's this issue when you build a high-rise and you have a number of condominiums, there's a gap between when you launch and when you fill up the entire building, and that's a capital risk, so could you use short-term rentals to help create new housing? We're not asking those questions.
Q: The hotel industry continues to insist that home-based rentals are at a competitive advantage because of fewer regulations. What's your response?
A: The [vacation-rental] industry has to grow up. You want to have a situation where the right regulation is in place, that it's easy to understand. For instance, traditionally, the owners have been responsible for submitting [occupancy] taxes, so if you were to say that we need a way to better account for these things, then we have to invest in those capabilities.
Q: Any concern that president-elect Trump may enact policies that could restrict international travel?
A: Travel adds so much enrichment: to cultural exchanges, to people building bonds. We learn as we travel that we're more common than different, so it would be a real shame if good, healthy travel was curbed.