HomeAway's techniques for building trust in home-sharing

Busines-to-business platform for the payment industry, PYMNTS, and payment service provider, YapStone's collaborative news media channel, Payments and The Platform Economy Playbook, featured the home-sharing economy in February of this year. 

In that playbook, HomeAway, the vacation rental marketplace, was spotlighted, and the need to ensure trust in transactions that take place across the platform. Compliance and regulatory issues remain top of mind, of course, but so does the overall experience of both buyers and sellers.

In an interview with PYMNTS, Marie Perrin-Largilliere, senior manager of global product marketing at HomeAway, got a bit more granular on how the firm seeks to engage both sides of the transaction.

The executive said that among the most important factors in both sides of the relationship – that is, travelers and home owners – are “trust, protection and reliability,” noting that “every traveler should trust that their payment is secure, and every homeowner should feel confident that they receive payments on time.”

The landscape on which to build that trust is a broad one, as HomeAway has over two million unique places to stay across 190 countries, she said, “so addressing the individual needs of different markets can be a challenge, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Expectations can differ from region to region regarding timing of payments, taxes, currencies, regulatory differences – and we look at all of those variables.”

Perrin-Largilliere pointed to her own firm’s Book with Confidence guarantee, wherein HomeAway offers comprehensive payment protection tied to the transaction. She stated, too, that a fraud detection team is tasked with watching for and preventing account takeovers.

“Data breaches, identity fraud and online scams are never identical or static instances,” she said. “Security threats of this nature are constantly evolving, so our team continuously works on innovative ways to detect and prevent them … We also test new technologies, like using AI and machine learning, to protect our customers.”

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