Our 15th Anniversary

In 2011 HomeAway.co.uk is celebrating its 15th birthday!

It all started in 1996 when a married couple, Richard Coundley and Marcelle Speller (you might have seen Marcelle on ‘The Secret Millionaire’ last year), founded a company called "Holiday-Rentals.com" after realising that with the rise of the internet there was a gap in the market to offer a more efficient way to advertise holiday homes. 

Holiday-Rentals.com was the UK’s first holiday rental listing site and by the end of the first year it had persuaded 100 owners to come on board (although sales calls often started with the question: 'Do you know what the internet is?!'). Fifteen years on and we’ve become the UK’s number one holiday rentals website, listing more than 250,000 properties across the world.
 
In 2005 HomeAway, Inc. was founded by Brian Sharples and Carl Shepherd who saw an opportunity to consolidate and grow this burgeoning market. Holiday-Rentals.com was acquired along with four other US sites and today HomeAway is the world's largest holiday rentals company, operating market leading sites throughout the world.

In 2009 Holiday-Rentals rebranded as ‘HomeAway Holiday-Rentals’ and started promoting the URL ‘HomeAway.co.uk’ to strengthen the global brand. In 2011 the final transition was made to ‘HomeAway.co.uk’ and a new logo was created to emphasise the new brand name.