HomeToGo Brand Guidelines: A 2014 Berlin Search Site, a 2021 Listing & Interhome

Three founders and a lot of listings.

HomeToGo was founded in Berlin in 2014 by Patrick Andrae, Wolfgang Heigl and Nils Regge, according to English and German Wikipedia; the company’s own timeline says HomeToGo “officially launches in Berlin” that year, and the trade site Shorttermrentalz gave the same founding year and Berlin headquarters in September 2025. Two of the founders already knew the travel search business. Wikipedia says Heigl had founded the flight search engine Swoodoo, later bought by Kayak, and Regge had founded Casamundo, a holiday rental company that HomeToGo itself would later buy.

The first idea was search. Wikipedia describes the early HomeToGo as a large-scale holiday rental search platform that gathered listings from many providers into one place. In 2017, the company says, the HomeToGo Marketplace began taking direct bookings, and Wikipedia dates the same change to that year.

German Wikipedia notes that the company’s own spelling is lower case, “home to go”, while the brand name in running text is written as one word with three capitals, HomeToGo; that is the spelling used throughout this guide.

Today the company describes two segments. The HomeToGo Marketplace is the consumer side, with websites and apps in more than 30 countries, according to Wikipedia and Shorttermrentalz; HomeToGo_PRO sells software and services to property managers and holiday rental providers. The company dates the start of its business-to-business software to 2020 and says it established HomeToGo_PRO as a segment in 2022; English Wikipedia says the name HomeToGo_PRO was adopted in December 2023.

Buying the market it searched.

HomeToGo grew by buying companies. In 2018, German Wikipedia says, it took over the assets of the holiday home portal Wimdu, the Casamundo company and Feries, owner of the Italian sites CaseVacanza.it and Agriturismo.it, and in December that year the American search site Tripping.com; the Spanish rural platform EscapadaRural followed in 2019. The company calls 2018 the year of its “first strategic acquisitions”.

In September 2021 HomeToGo went public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange through a merger with the special-purpose company Lakestar SPAC I, according to Wikipedia and a January 2025 report in Shorttermrentalz; the company gives its ticker as HTG. The buying continued. On 1 March 2021 a HomeToGo subsidiary bought the Berlin channel-management software maker Smoobu, which kept its own name, English Wikipedia says; the article describes Smoobu as a channel manager, property management system and direct booking engine for independent hosts, and lists it among Booking.com’s “Premier Plus” connectivity providers and Airbnb’s preferred software partners for 2026. In 2022 came AMIVAC, a French subscription-based rental platform founded in 2002 and until then the holiday rental unit of Groupe SeLoger, the German operators e-domizil and atraveo, and the travel software firm SECRA. HomeToGo also took a majority stake in KMW Reisen and Super Urlaub, short-break specialists behind Kurz Mal Weg and Kurzurlaub; Shorttermrentalz dated that deal to December 2023, Wikipedia to 2024.

The largest step was Interhome, the Swiss holiday home company owned since 1989 by Hotelplan, part of the Swiss retailer Migros. HomeToGo said on 23 January 2025 that it had agreed key commercial terms with Migros, Shorttermrentalz reported. In August 2025 the Swiss Competition Commission cleared Dertour Group’s purchase of the rest of Hotelplan, without Interhome, and the trade site reported that HomeToGo would close the deal that week. German Wikipedia gives the completion date as 28 August 2025. In September 2025, Shorttermrentalz reported, HomeToGo_PRO became the group’s largest business unit.

How holiday rental brands present themselves.

Holiday rental companies fall into two broad groups: marketplaces, which list homes run by others, and managers, which run the homes themselves. Vacasa, which English Wikipedia describes as a vacation rental management company, and Sonder, which leased and operated its own apartments, belong to the second group. A manager answers to owners or landlords as well as to guests, and Vacasa built a separate app for the owners whose homes it looked after, according to the same source.

Search and listing pages carry much of this work. In 2019 Vacasa began showing its rental homes directly in Google search results, English Wikipedia says, and in July 2026, ShortTermRentalz reported, TravelAI relaunched Sonder.com as a booking site whose listings would be selected for design, location and quality. In a 2020 profile, Surface magazine illustrated Sonder with photographs of its interiors in Philadelphia, Savannah and Montreal, and quoted its founder on celebrating “architecture and the arts.”

Naming follows ownership. When Marriott International signed its licensing agreement with Sonder in August 2024, the portfolio was to join its system as a collection called “Sonder by Marriott Bonvoy.” In 2026 the operator Prism opened former Sonder buildings in the United States under its Belvilla brand, as Belvilla District 6, and Casago’s franchisees trade under place names such as Casago San Diego and Casago Belize, ShortTermRentalz reported.

Apps sit at the centre of the guest’s stay. Surface described Sonder guests receiving an access code and concierge services through an app in place of a front desk. This guide sets out each company’s founding, owners, listings and sales as dated facts, and marks clearly what rests only on a company’s own word.

A marketplace, a software arm and HomeToGo Originals.

The brand now covers several layers. The Marketplace is where travellers search; Wikipedia says it offers more than 20 million holiday rental listings from over 60,000 providers, and Shorttermrentalz gave the same 20 million figure in September 2025. On the product side the company has leaned on artificial intelligence: Wikipedia lists the AI Mode travel planner of 2023, the assistant AI Sunny in 2024 and an AI Filter for search in 2025.

In June 2026 HomeToGo launched HomeToGo Originals, an umbrella brand for the property management companies it owns, Shorttermrentalz reported. Interhome is now presented as “Interhome, a HomeToGo Original” and Kraushaar as “Kraushaar, a HomeToGo Original”, keeping their own names, local teams and owner relationships, and the new branding was being rolled out across their websites, marketing material and local service offices. The company says future property management acquisitions will join the same umbrella. On its own pages HomeToGo calls the group “Europe’s leading vacation rental group”; that is the company’s description.

The leadership has stayed close to the founders. The company names Patrick Andrae as co-founder and chief executive and Wolfgang Heigl as co-founder and chief strategy officer on its Management Board. Its September 2025 vision statement, “Unlocking Better Stays”, frames the business as connecting travellers with places to stay while giving hosts and partners demand and technology, Shorttermrentalz reported.

For a design guide, HomeToGo shows how a search brand can stay in front of a house of acquired names, using endorsements such as “a HomeToGo Original” rather than renaming everything. Compare Interhome, the Swiss company it bought in 2025, and Holidu, another German holiday rental search company. For this guide we use navy, a warm orange and linen with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep HomeToGo’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.