Homestay.com

Another accommodation booking site is on the market. HW founder Tom Kennedy has created a new site to book home stays.

Kennedy set to reinvent holidays with Homestays

[Tom Kennedy] was involved in the Avalon hostel in Dublin before hooking up with serial technology entrepreneur Ray Nolan in a move to try to make hostel bed booking more efficient. They set up Web Reservations International (WRI), better known by its brand name hostelworld.com, in 1999.
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Kennedy's masterplan is to put a similar booking and organisational structure on the massively fragmented home-stays market. This is where people come and stay in other people's houses for a fee. It is one of the fastest growing sectors in the entire tourism and accommodation space.

According to the article, the Hilton Hotel chain views home stay operators as the biggest threat to their business over the next decade. Sites like AirBnB already provided travelers with countless alternatives to hotels.

Homestay.com isn’t just going to provide a booking engine for accommodation though. It will also give the customer the ability to find families with similar interests to their own. It’s like a combination between Couchsurfing, where guests choose hosts by their personal profiles, and AirBnB, where travelers pay to sleep in someone’s home.

Drawing from social media and partner data, Home-stays.com will be able to match up a tennis fan with a family that plays tennis or somebody planning to visit a city for a marathon with a running host or a tourist coming to the Irish Open will be teamed up with a golfer. The potential is endless.

This aspect may completely revolutionise the accommodation space as travellers "come looking for the experience of staying with people who share the same interests," Kennedy forecasts. This could be a game changer.

The site has already secured 3€ million in funding from a venture capital firm and other investors.

Something interesting points about Homestay.com:

• They work with “Local Partners” who will visit and evaluate the home and either approve or decline it as a host. That’s a pretty good way to assure quality. The Local Partner also provides assistance setting up the listing, choosing selling points, setting prices, and even guest support. It’s like a HW Buddy, but in person. Pretty cool!

• Bookings are instantly confirmed. With both Couchsurfing and AirBnB the hosts have the option of vetting the travelers and declining them if they feel like it. Similar to HW's setup, Homestay.com will work through availability calendars for instant confirmed bookings rather than stay requests.
• There is an annual fee of 50 €/£/$ (depending on your location) to be a host. The customer pays a 15% deposit to confirm a booking. The public information does not specifically state that this is a commission due from the host, and commissions are not mentioned at all in the Host FAQ.
• Guests cannot currently write a review of their hosts, but this feature is in the works. In the meantime guests are told to email their review to the company, and they will hold it until the reviews feature is ready to go.