HouseTrip.com Blog – The official blog for holiday apartments

Hi all,

Good news: we now have thousands of holiday apartments in top cities! We have places in some of Europe’s dream cities at all price ranges. Some examples:

Holiday apartments in Paris

From 50€ a night with Studio Montmartre Clichy (sleeps 4)

To 2′000€ a night with Luxury Town House (sleeps 10)

Holiday apartments in London

From 36€ a night with Studio B (sleeps 3)

To 1′350€ a night with 7 Bedroom Town House (sleeps 13)

Holiday apartments in Berlin

From 40€ a night with Bergmannkiez Kreuzberg Apartment (sleeps 2)

To 380€ a night with Above the roofs… (sleeps 8 )

Tags: holiday apartments Berlin, holiday apartments London, holiday apartments Paris

Dear Readers,

First of all, I apologize for not having written for a while: we were really busy over the last few weeks, working relentlessly on improving the website.

You certainly notice the changes, in fact most of the website was modified: the design has been completely redone, some features were removed, some features were added, the rental process was modified, etc.

Why did we make so many changes? Because, after the launch of HouseTrip.com back in September, it took a couple of months to realize what really constitutes the core of HouseTrip:

1. Guests want to find the perfect holiday apartment and book it as easily as possible
2. Owners want to get many bookings for their rental with a system as simple as possible to manage these bookings

These sentences might sound like “no-brainers” but believe me it is not that easy to understand what constitute the core of your venture when you are a startup. Luckily, we believe we’ve got it right now.

The changes on the website are really aimed around these 2 lines, and over the next few weeks/months we will keep improving with that in mind. If you have any suggestions for us, please email them: we are always eager to get your feedback.

Just to give you a simple example on how, as a guest, finding a holiday apartment is now really easy: say you want to book a holiday apartment in Paris. You now simply have to go to the Paris search results, find rentals you are interested in, ask the relevant owners to confirm availability: as soon as one does so, you proceed to booking directly with your credit card. Quite easy!

Dear reader, I’ll try to write another post as soon as possible on this blog and until then I wish you a happy holiday apartment renting!

Cheers,

Arnaud

Tags: easier holiday apartment experience, HouseTrip.com changes, new features

HouseTrip won yesterday the Getfundedshow @ World Travel Market. Competing against 17 other startups, HouseTrip was first selected as one of the four finalists of the event on the 11th of November and was selected as the winner after its second pitch on the 12th.

The panels judging the startups were composed of high profile individuals in the travel industry and of famous investors, including (to name a few, full list can be read here):
• Alex Hoye, CEO Latitude Group
• Debu Purkayastha, Principal – Corporate Development / M&A at Google
• Hugo Burge, Executive Chairman, Cheapflights and Founder, Howzat Media
• Dinesh Dhamija, Founder, eBookers
• Peter Waller, Group M&A Director, Thomas Cook
• Glenn Fogel, EVP Corporate Development, Priceline
• Mike Chalfen, General Partner, Advent Ventures

Startups at the event were marked against 6 criteria, from the idea to the investment potential. Jason Katz, the Founding Partner of KP Capital, who announced the winner, described HouseTrip as the startup with the highest risk/reward ratio of the event for potential investors.

We are obviously thrilled to have won the event and to see such recognition from our travel industry peers. The event in itself was extremely useful to us in terms of networking and also to be able to get feedback on the venture from successful travel entrepreneurs and investors. Stay in touch with HouseTrip over the coming months to check on our progress, we keep making the site better based on your feedbacks!

Arnaud

Tags: getfundedshow, world travel market

Dear readers,

I just wanted to introduce a startup located only a few minutes drive away from HouseTrip in Lausanne, Switzerland. We find their services pretty awesome so we wanted to share it with you.

RouteRANK is a software solution for travel planning. Unlike other solutions that consider only one means of transport at a time, routeRANK addresses the entire travel route by integrating rail, road and air connections. In a single search, routeRANK’s technology finds and ranks the best possible travel routes, allowing users to sort them according to their priorities such as price, travel time and CO2 emissions.
RouteRANK also offers custom developed versions of its proprietary software to corporate customers and organizations, for their internal use or use on their own website, in travel and logistics.
The routeRANK public website illustrates one fully functioning version of the software. Although here the focus is on European travel, airports and flight connections outside Europe are integrated. A widget is freely available for those who wish to easily integrate this routeRANK functionality to their own website.

Do go and test RouteRANK on their website. My guess is you’ll be pretty amazed at how detailed they can calculate a route for you!

Arnaud

Tags: Lausanne, RouteRank, Startup, Travel

Please, vote for HouseTrip on KillerStartups by clicking on the image below and then on the “+” sign on the top left corner.

Many thanks!

Arnaud

Arnaud and Junjun at Google HQ, Zurich

Hi everyone

This is my first blog entry since joining the HouseTrip team a few weeks ago, shortly after launch. And it’s been a hectic first few weeks! But the signs are really promising. The team is great: the organisation is very dynamic, and most importantly, everyone is extremely nice to work with! We’re now acquiring new properties quite fast – many of them are really quite special, do take a look – and there’s a lot of interest generally. I’ve spoken to quite a few of our new hosts personally and they’re really positive about the platform and the innovative features we offer.

We had a great day today! Arnaud’s been negotiating with Google for a few weeks now, after he met a Google high flyer at a CEO day who expressed an interest in collaborating with us to maximise our AdWords expediency. So today we headed up to Zurich, home of Google’s European HQ, for a meeting with two of their senior account managers. We had a very productive discussion, we learnt a lot about some of the secrets behind good AdWords campaigns, and best of all, they treated us to lunch! The office is amazing, lots of cool features and the vibe seemed quite laid back although we all got the impression that the employees were extremely high calibre. The working atmosphere seemed very positive, empowering and inspiring: exactly the kind of atmosphere we aim to cultivate and maintain as HouseTrip grows.

The people we met were very enthusiastic about HouseTrip, they thought it was a really great project and that it would be well suited to AdWords campaigns. So I’m really looking forward to working with the Google guys and over the coming weeks and months I think we can create some really powerful campaigns to spread the word about our great website!

I’ll post again soon with another update!

Ciao for now

Ben

The period auctioned runs from the 1st of October to the 30th of October and the minimum length of stay is 5 nights. The property is described this way: “Casa Verde sits in a beautiful exotic garden measuring almost one acre of private grounds. The three-bedroom pine wood house features breathtaking ocean and mountain views. Located only 5 minutes from downtown Uvita, the national park and beach of Bahia Ballena as well as Playa Hermosa and a fast array of restaurants and tourist attractions, you do not have to compromise on convenience while still being away from the hassle and amidst nature and tranquility.” You have until Wednesday night to make you bid: view the property and bid from here.

Tags: Auction, costa rica, holiday rentals, low prices, vacation rental, €75 a night

Dear readers,

I haven’t written for a while: the past few days have been rather hectic with the launch!

As an introduction to HouseTrip, we have done a short video explaining how it works for the hosts. You can watch it below. Enjoy!

HouseTrip for the hosts

Tags: bed and breakfast, guestrooms, holiday rentals, hosts, HouseTrip, introduction, video

Dear readers,

After months of work, I am proud to tell you that HouseTrip will go live tomorrow – monday – night!

Special thanks to our developers who have done an amazing job since they started working on the website in the beginning of May. Special thanks as well to all the other members of our great team for months of brilliant work! And of course we are really grateful to all the people who have supported us in the first step of our fantastic venture!

However, it is only the beginning. I am sure that in a few months I’ll be thanking all our users for traveling with HouseTrip! Early feedbacks from the closed beta are very good: HouseTrip is on its way to revolutionize the way you travel! So dear – future – users, add your properties, stay at properties, … time to enjoy all the services we enjoyed developing for you!

All the best,

Arnaud

Tags: launch

… in Paris at the E-Commerce fair on the 29th, 30th of September and 1st of October. We will be in the “innovation village”.

Tags: E-Commerce Paris, meet us