The new HouseTrip starts today

It’s funny to think that just two years ago HouseTrip was only an idea Junjun and I had in mind. Just out of university, we were both travelling around Europe looking for investors (to finance us) and developers (to actually do the website we had in mind). We eventually found both, registered the company in June 2009 and launched the website in January 2010.

Since then we’ve hit many milestones and have grown much faster than we had ever hoped, becoming Europe’s largest holiday apartments booking website in less than a year! Today we hit two other major milestones:

• We have launched the new HouseTrip website. The whole team has been putting a lot of effort into the redesign, we truly hope you like it. The picture on the homepage was of course taken in a real HouseTrip apartment: the Hoxton Loft in London.
• We’ve announced the investment of $2.7Mio in HouseTrip by Index Ventures, one of the world’s most renowned Internet investors (invested in such successes as Skype, Betfair, MySQL & Last.fm). We couldn’t be more thrilled to have Index Ventures onboard and their investment truly gives us the means for our ambition.

To add onto the excitement, we’ve also learned that HouseTrip was selected as one of the 9 “travel & transport” companies in the Telegraph’s Start-Up 100 selection that gathers Europe’s top 100 startups.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the HouseTrip team for their awesome job during the last few months and to also thank dearly all our guests and hosts without whom HouseTrip would still be at the idea stage. I cannot be grateful enough to them for the fantastic traction HouseTrip has seen since the beginning.

So, what are we going to do with all that money? Fairly simple: keep get closer to our vision of proposing holiday apartments everywhere around the world as an alternative to hotels. We think that more and more people realise it makes more sense to book a whole apartment for the price of a hotel room; on HouseTrip we want to ultimately offer them the opportunity to do so all over the world, as easily and safely as it is to book a hotel room. Concretely this means having more and more apartments listed (click here to list an apartment for free) and keep making it easier and safer to book them.

In a nutshell, watch this space, as a lot of new exciting travel opportunities will keep appearing!