RedAwning: The Most Complete Platform for Vacation Rental Marketing, Distribution, Promotions, and More

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As vacation rentals became a more popular, realistic option for travelers, the only thing missing was technology. Travelers wanted to be able to shop for vacation rentals as easily as they shopped for hotels. And vacation rental owners and managers needed simpler ways to sell, market, and distribute their rooms.

Enter, RedAwning.

With a seasoned entrepreneur at the helm, they’ve become the industry’s only complete marketing, distribution, revenue, service, payments, promotions, and optimization platform. We sat down with that entrepreneur, RedAwning’s founder and CEO, Tim Choate, to learn more about how they got here and, more importantly, what’s next for this innovative company.
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Tim, we know RedAwning, but tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from and what did your journey look like leading up to RedAwning?

I’ve been an entrepreneur for 30 years and this is my 3rd Internet Startup. I previously launched, built and sold the first company in digital software distribution, and a leading platform for online lead generation, one of which IPO’d on Nasdaq. I have a track record of innovation, leveraging the power and unique aspects of the Internet, which I am now applying to the short term rental industry. I have a degree in Marketing and Entrepreneurial Management from the Wharton School.

Let’s do a quick origin story. When was RedAwning founded and where did the idea come from?

I started RedAwning to bring instant booking and hotel-style consistency to the vacation rental category. I was traveling in Europe with a friend as I considered my next Internet venture and was astonished at just how difficult it was to find and book homes in 2008, given that hotels already offered easy online booking.

I came back to the US, identified that this was a really large category already even with the impossible layers of fragmentation, and set a course to build a vacation rental company around hotel-style booking and service approaches to make it easier and better for guests and hosts alike.

Today, RedAwning partners with over 1,000 hosts from very large companies like Vail Resorts to individual owners, to help them maximize their reservations and income, minimize their work and costs, and provide the best hospitality possible to guests. RedAwning has led many industry innovations over the past 12 years and now offers the industry’s most comprehensive platform for host success.

You don’t build a successful company like RedAwning without solving some key problem or pain point. What is that solution you provide with RedAwning?

Our solutions are designed to serve both property hosts of all kinds and guests.

• We know that guests want more space and the comforts and safety of a home or apartment, but have been held back by the complexity of finding and booking homes.
• We know that traditional hospitality companies want access to all of these new guests, often found in new/non-traditional hotel channels, and want to optimize and grow their businesses.

RedAwning bridges both gaps by enabling hosts of all sizes and types to reach guests wherever they shop, through the industry’s only complete marketing, distribution, revenue, service, payments, promotions, and optimization platform.

What is your team doing that nobody else is?

Our solution is more comprehensive than any other company and serves both guests and hosts, as well as the channels we work with. We have led many innovations in the category to date, such as the origination of Free Cancel policies for vacation rentals in the US with Booking.com, the first large scale professional partner to Airbnb, the first professional partner for instant booking to Vrbo, and the first property management partner to Google Travel.

Overall, we are always charting new ground that others are able to follow and we enjoy our role in driving innovation for everyone.

As you look back on your and RedAwning’s path, any milestones or moments or clients that you’re especially proud of or excited about?

Our launch with Vail Resorts, being the only outside speaker to Airbnb’s internal professional launch team, going live with Google Travel, our multi-layered partnership with Amazon, our launch of instant booking with HomeAway(Vrbo now). Achieving profitability. There are so many more milestones…. we’ve had a lot of fun!

Not a bad list! So, what’s next for RedAwning? Anything new or exciting coming up?

Always. To me the joy of a startup is the constant rethinking and innovation that makes the company great and a fun place to be. Right now, we are achieving incredible results when we combine our marketing, distribution and optimization, which creates industry leading demand, with automatic LOS based pricing optimization that constantly updates with that demand.

We are also finding great opportunities in repackaging timeshare and other suite type units from resort properties as short term rentals, which I will share at our presentation.