Who says the drive to instant bookings on search engines can be hard (well, TripAdvisor, for starters) – in vacation rentals it appears to be working out very well.

Vacation rental marketplace Tripping has quietly been adding instant booking functionality to its search results in the past few months, mirroring the strategy of over travel search engines such as TripAdvisor.

But whilst TripAdvisor has seen that the process has not been as smooth as perhaps first anticipated, at least from a financial perspective, Tripping has now reached the heady milestone of a massive three million vacation rental properties now available for instant booking on its site.

This is almost a third of its total database of properties around the world (it currently has around ten million globally).

Whilst the three million figure is keeping the top brass at Tripping happy, such as benchmark is a useful one for those that worry over the vacation rental sector’s ability to come fully online.

Having a solid partner in the guise of Booking.com to feed it content clearly helps – the Priceline Group-owned giant insists on real-time availability and booking for its rentals – but this accounts for around a third of the three million.

The rest comes, according to CEO Jen O’Neal who was speaking at the ITB convention in Berlin this week, from a combination of channel manager platforms that have the functionality and also property management systems (MyBookingPal, et al) that have plugged in.

HomeAway content does currently not feature in Tripping’s instant booking programme.

Tripping estimates that it will reach around 14 million vacation rental properties on its platform this year, with 4.5 million instantly bookable.