It’s taken a lot of grit and perseverance to get here: I’m so proud to announce the official consumer launch of Anystays – we’re helping guests and hosts experience great stays, not just bookings.
We’re a scrappy startup going up against multinationals like Airbnb, Booking.com and Expedia, trying to break the stranglehold this monopoly has on the industry and make things fairer for guests and hosts alike. Unlike the 15-18%+ you’d traditionally expect for these listing platforms, our commission for basic bookings is 5%. Direct bookings are great, but it is hard for hosts, especially small businesses, to compete with multi-million-dollar marketing budgets. We’re offering a middle-ground and a bunch of awesome tooling to automate your business and provide more value than just bookings.
For guests, we want to ensure you get good value for money. One of the ways we can do this is by lowering hosts’ cost basis with our lower rates and providing them with native tools to help them serve you. In future, we want to make your experience from property search to check-out and post-stay reviews as tailored, frictionless and simple as possible.
My goal with this platform is to create the future of travel – centred around great guest experience, integrated services, business automation and a fundamental respect for local communities.
Even getting to this point hasn’t been easy and our next big challenge is early-stage growth when we’re reliant on reaching a critical mass of guests and hosts to use the platform to make it viable. The history of the project is rough.
I started out in short-term rentals in 2017 and I did a ton of work on workflows for hosts, including my own rental company – Velo Apartments. Looking back on it, the fact that Velo even exists blows my mind. My family background traditionally doesn’t allow you to start companies. I had about £2.5k in the bank at the time from some freelance web development work and whatever savings I had from birthdays and helping my dad stack furniture for home removals. I put £2k into Velo. Between my parents and I we managed to save up around £10k over some time to start Velo. We made a lot of mistakes and nearly lost it all on some bad R2Rs in the first year. But we cut them loose and since then the company has been thriving, being trusted to manage several holiday rentals over the last few years. Covid decimated the industry, but we survived albeit at a smaller scale. In 2022, we bought our first unit. The whole time we’ve kept as much money in the company as possible, only paying ourselves a small amount when profits were particularly good.
Working in this industry has given me a deep appreciation for how hard it is. How many moving parts there are, how difficult it is to provide guests with an unforgettably positive service. Talking to hosts, two things that stuck with me are a) how sick they are of high booking fees and b) how difficult it is to get all their backend systems to play nice.
Talking to guests, having to jump through hoops with difficulties in finding the information you need, not knowing whether a host is trustworthy and atrociously high cleaning/service fees or outrageous rules lead to a terrible experience.
What eventually became Anystays started out as a little code project in my university dorm room. I was aiming to create a better channel manager – a system that at its core connects booking platforms to prevent double bookings, though many do much more – since hosts by-and-large were not happy with the price or functionality of existing solutions. I didn’t really have much thought about how this was going to work out, I was having fun (I might do a blog post about some of the dumbest mistakes I made in the early days – it will be fun reading for how not to build).
Somehow through my conversations with people this escalated and despite my best efforts, it became centred around building a new booking platform.
Short-term rentals (STRs), and real estate in general, have very high inertia. Pushing new processes is difficult enough, without trying to introduce more technology. There were many people who told me not to even try because all the low-hanging fruit is gone and without access to a ton of capital, you’ll never build anything in the space. For every person that said don’t try, there was someone else who really wanted the endgame of the company to happen.
We’re bootstrapped at the moment and that makes it incredibly hard to build the coolest things I want to build. That being said, I never imagined even getting to launch something like this a few years ago. I don’t know if we’ll get to the end game of the company but what I do know is I’m going to give it one hell of a shot and that all starts with small steps like making bookings cheaper and customer service better.
It’s always sad when I see companies build great products but then rest on their laurels. If you’re not innovating, not improving, then what’s the point? My commitment is that Anystays will never be that. We’ll keep building, branching out, solving new problems, making things better. It may have taken me a while to get here, and I still have a lot of work to do and things to learn, but one thing is for certain, I never give up.
To everyone reading this, by joining us as a host or using us to find places to stay, you too can be a part of the future we want to build.
To everyone that has, and continues to give me advice, suggestions and ultimately back me to the hilt – thank you!
I'm building the future of travel accommodation
