Airbnb was barely known in the Caribbean in the first half of 2012, with HomeAway and VRBO accounting for the overwhelming majority of online vacation rental distribution on the island. The HomeAway IPO, completed in June 2011, had given the vacation rental platform sector its first publicly traded benchmark and was reshaping expectations about what an online vacation rental marketplace could be worth. Jamaica’s traditional villa rental market was performing strongly and remained the most commercially significant segment of the island’s STR sector.

HomeAway’s landmark NASDAQ IPO in June 2011 — the first public offering by a dedicated vacation rental platform — gave the industry its first public market valuation benchmark and signalled that online vacation rental distribution had matured into a commercially credible institutional business. Airbnb was growing rapidly from a small base, Jamaica recorded approximately 1.95 million stopover arrivals for the year, and the Caribbean’s traditional villa rental market was operating entirely without formal regulation.