Hopper Expands into New Travel Vertical with Addition of Home Rentals

Short-term home rentals have surged in popularity over the past couple of years, and during the pandemic, they became an even more appealing option for travelers. With decreased business travel and a desire for more novel experiences, short-term home rentals jumped from 17% of accommodation bookings to 27% in 2021 (Phocuswright Research, 2021). Much like Hopper’s own users who are primarily Gen Z and millennial travelers, short-term home renters skew younger than the U.S. traveler population overall, with more than four in 10 rental travelers under the age of 35. In fact, about 40% of Hopper customers indicated they prefer homes over hotels and 24% have no preference between the two. And, 44% of Hopper travelers book for more than two people which also demonstrates why home rentals are an appealing option.

While many travelers prefer booking homes to hotels, the experience is still full of pain points. Many Hopper customers cited frustrations such as it’s hard to ensure they’re getting the best price on an individual property, they’re hit with hidden or surprise fees, and cancellation and payment terms can be confusing and inflexible. After listening to our customers, we concluded there’s an opportunity to ultimately build a home rental booking experience that offers travelers more price transparency and flexibility. 

Today, we’re thrilled to announce Hopper has launched short-term rental homes in its app. With top inventory from around the world, Hopper Homes is giving you more lodging options in the same place where you already book your flights, hotels, and car rentals.

To help you find the perfect property, Hopper Homes has advanced filters such as location, the number of bedrooms, amenities, and price will be added soon as well. The app also offers instant booking capabilities, which means you don’t have to wait to be approved to book and can secure your reservation right away. Hopper works directly with professional property suppliers to ensure customers access the highest quality and most desirable properties around. 

There are many exciting features that we’re planning to roll out in the next few months. For example, we’ll be integrating many of our most popular fintech features – like Price Prediction and Cancel for Any Reason – in order to deliver a home booking experience that guarantees customers the best price with the most flexible cancellation policy. Short-term home rentals historically have highly inflexible cancellation policies, particularly 30 to 60 days before the stay. Hopper’s dynamically priced cancellation and change products are making travel more flexible to align with traveler needs. 

We’ll also be integrating Carrot Cash, our Hopper credit system, to increase loyalty, drive repeat purchases, and most importantly, save customers money. According to Phocuswright, 89 percent of travelers now belong to at least one travel loyalty program, significantly correlating with more frequent travel purchases. Now, for the first time ever, anytime you book any type of travel - flights, hotels, cars, and soon homes - you’ll earn Carrot Cash back. As you accumulate Carrot Cash, you’ll be able to apply that credit to any type of booking on Hopper. The ability to earn cash back on all travel purchases, not just one category of travel, allows Hopper users to get the most out of every road trip, staycation or flight they take. 

The Hopper app has nearly 70 million downloads and ranked as the most downloaded travel booking app in the United States last year (according to Apptopia). Hopper Homes is available to book on Hopper for iOS today. We’ll be rolling out updates for Android in the following weeks. 

Homes will also eventually be available to our industry partners via Hopper Cloud, Hopper’s B2B initiative that allows other brands to sell travel fintech and agency content that customers love. 

And property managers interested in listing on Hopper, please reach out here.