Vrbo, formerly known as HomeAway, is a leading travel platform that connects travelers with vacation rental properties like homes, apartments, and villas. It also provides homeowners with the opportunity to list their properties for short-term rentals, enabling them to earn income from their spaces. In 2020, Vrbo attracted approximately 28 million unique monthly visitors, boasting over 1.1 million property listings and achieving annual gross bookings exceeding USD 4 billion, resulting in profits surpassing USD 2 billion.

Japan holds a pivotal role in the travel industry, both as an inbound and outbound market, displaying a strong demand for vacation rentals. To address this, the Asia-Pacific (APAC) design team undertook a project to thoroughly understand the Japanese market, offering product design adjustments and strategic insights tailored to this unique market. With Airbnb's notable presence in Japan and the emergence of local competitors who better understand the preferences of the Japanese audience, it becomes essential for Vrbo to comprehend the market's significance and determine its potential entry, along with the most effective market-entry strategies. Additionally, Japan's distinctive commercial and digital design aesthetics, as well as its distinct consumer behavior patterns, make it an ideal "test bed" for Vrbo's potential expansion into other Asian markets like China and South Korea.

You can read more details and see more visuals in the PDF case study!

We were pretty new into the research organization even when we had spent two years in the company. This is because the HomeAway Singapore team operated almost independently from HQ, with our own design, product and engineering teams deciding on our own. However, 2018 came and we integrated more and more into the HQ UX team, including research team.

So, the first thing to do was to actually introduce ourselves to the research team, and walked them through our projects and this particular intent of doing research in Japan.

To our surprise, the Research Director himself welcomed us openly and helped us plan it directly. Because of this research leadership support, we managed to secure approvals including budgets. We still had to justify our projects to the local APAC leadership who eventually supported paying for it.

We then proceeded on planning for the research. This actually happened almost concurrently with securing approvals and budget. We drafted a research plan that was refined with the help of the research team. We also figured out we don’t have a hands-on help here in Singapore, so we looked for help from a research agency in Singapore who also has contact in Japan. This helps us plan recruitment and translation smoothly.

Our test plan included:

We prepared translated prototypes on Invision as we didn’t have any Japanese language POS back then. This proved to be a big challenge for our team.

We took a trip to Japan, to visit travelers and homeowners who host on HomeAway. We conducted two research studies in Tokyo and Nagano, and interviewed four travelers and four homeowners each in the cities.

We came ready armed with questions, prototypes and locations that were fixed by our locally-appointed fixers.

It was a great 8-day of trip for us and to know exactly the answer of what we’re looking for in the location itself!

When we flew back to Singapore, we spent more time synthesizing data and reviewing drafts within the team.

After a few while, we had an official readout attend by the design and product team at HomeAway, and soon after the larger org during a Quarterly Design Review.

The design team in Singapore also presented a parallel deliverable which is a “Japan Design Playbook” that consists of principles and anecdotes of designing for Japan (and East Asia).

We also worked together with the product and engineering team to propose some design changes aligning with the findings.

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