Travellers looking to escape the charmless, bland neutrality of the hotel and hostel industry have had alternative options since the 70’s. What started as a cultural exchange after the Hippy movement of the 60’s (‘WWOOFing’) has grown into an entire quasi open-source business model for a new generation of online businesses. Some well-established sites have offered short-term stays to travellers for years but with little security or choice but now a new-wave of online start-ups have exploded onto the market.
With the steady increase of households connected to the Internet, the inclusion of super-fast broadband networks and the popularity of social-networking sites, it wouldn’t be long before community-oriented traveller accommodation sites began to grow. Like an accommodation ‘ebay’, hosts register their available-spaces and wait for browsers to contact them, all the features of any decent social-networking site are present with a review and comment system, picture albums to advertise the space and the ease of communicating with each other.
Companies provide this unique service to a global audience of community-
conscious travellers. An increase in people looking to generate alternative extra-income during the financial crunch exposed the classic example of renting out spare-rooms to foreign-exchange students as an under-developed concept. It didn’t take long for start-ups such as Wimdu to grow a business around the idea that, with proper community management, the security and anonymity of well-established online transaction providers and accessibilty of social-networking, people can easily rent-out their homes or rooms for short-periods.
Young companies such as Wimdu are reverse-engineering the typical social network model by linking-out to strangers, it seems there’s still plenty of potential growth in a relatively young market.
