Sleep in a stranger’s house, join a dinner party where you know no one, hire a bike from a local ... The boom in collaborative social travel continues apace, with locals catering directly for travellers wanting a more real (or cheaper) deal.
Leading the charge is airbnb, the phenomenally successful global lodging website that is now planning to branch out into city tours and other travel experiences.
Increasingly the middleman is being cut out of all areas of travel, as tourists enjoy peer-to-peer tours by locals, home-cooked meals, and equipment, car and even boat hire.
From January, Spanish start-up Trip4Real – which is partly bankrolled by Catalan superstar chef Ferran Adrià – plans to launch in London, with at least 150 hosts on its books. The competitor to Vayable already offers 2,500 activities across 50 Spanish cities and shows no sign of slowing down, with further expansion into other European cities – including Lisbon, Paris and Rome – to follow soon. “It’s a magic combination of offering extra income to locals in difficult times and providing authentic experiences to travellers. It’s not that the desire for authentic travel hasn’t been there before, but big companies can’t deliver it. We have a solution that can,” said Emily Elwes, Trip4Real’s communications manager.
Over in the US, visitors to Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle are giving car-rental giants like Hertz and Alamo a miss and using traveller-to-traveller car hire service Flightcar, while for sailors in the US there’s Boatbound, with over 13 million owners offsetting the cost of boat ownership by renting theirs out to “pre-screened, qualified” travellers. Meanwhile Spinlister, which provides bike and surf rentals from locals in more than 100 countries, has now added snow equipment rental.
Travellers wanting to join a dinner party or supper club with locals have more choice than ever. Feastly, in several major US cities, offers experiences such as an 11-course Pakistani Ramadan feast in Washington DC. PlateCulture, which launched last year and mostly arranges meals across Asia, continues to add new options. EatWith – founded in Tel Aviv in 2013 – now offers meals in 90 cities in 32 countries (with more than 200 hosts in Barcelona alone). To ensure hosts offer a genuine hospitality experience and are not just in it for the money, EatWith implements a tight vetting process, with only 4% of applicants accepted to the site.
“The key to these experiences is that it’s really a personal one-to-one transaction,” says Bournemouth University tourism professor Stephen Page. “I thought airbnb was crazy at first, but the need for authentic experiences is there. It’s a natural evolution facilitated, in part, by social media. Innovations are giving people more power and flexibility to get rid of the distribution chain. I think it’s a trend that’s going to last – and become ever more mainstream.”
