Escapia Appoints Internet and Travel Veteran Bill Furlong as CEO
SEATTLE – April 14, 2006 – Escapia, Inc., a leading software and services company for the vacation rental industry, today announced that Internet software and travel industry veteran Bill Furlong has been named Chief Executive Officer (CEO).
Prior to joining Escapia, Bill was COO of Mpire.com, a Seattle-based e-commerce vendor developing a suite of eBay automation tools that help small, medium and large businesses manage their sales process. Bill was formerly President and CEO of Mountain Travel Sobek, one of the nation's leading travel outfitters. In the mid and late 1990's, he held several senior positions with Microsoft managing product planning, product development and marketing for Expedia.com, CarPoint.com, HomeAdvisor.com, Sidewalk.com and MSN Shopping. As Vice President of sales and marketing at Cranium, Inc. he was responsible for driving the company's revenue goals and domestic brand development. While at Cranium, Bill expanded retail distribution from three accounts to every major toy retailer in the country, helping Cranium to become the first company to win the toy industry Game of the Year for three consecutive years. Bill also held key marketing positions at Time Warner, and was a financial analyst with Morgan Stanley in their New York and Hong Kong offices. Bill holds an MBA from Harvard University and a BA from Dartmouth College.
"Property managers around the world are relying upon Escapia's Vacation Rental Suite every day to keep track of their reservations and process their bookings," said Furlong. "This company has an incredible opportunity to grow the services that it offers to its clients and to continue to be an innovation leader in the vacation rental industry. I'm looking forward to leading a company of incredibly talented people dedicated to serving our customer's needs." Already this calendar year, Escapia Inc. has powered over $50 million in vacation rental bookings for its clients, up over 280% from the same period in 2005.
Furlong joins another travel industry expert, Steve Murch, who was recently named the Company's Chairman. Murch, also a Microsoft veteran, co-founded online vacation rental network VacationSpot.com in 1997 which was purchased by Expedia (Nasdaq: EXPE) in 2000. "The Board of Directors is extremely pleased that Bill has joined Escapia," said Murch. "Bill provides tremendous business and innovation leadership to build upon the foundation that's already in place."
Bill joins a team with an incredibly talented and experienced group of vacation rental experts and professionals, including the co-founder of First Resort Software and past leaders of Microsoft, Amazon.com, IBM and Expedia.