Apartum promises order from the chaos of holiday rentals

With four years experience in the vacation rental sector, the apartum team felt the need for a comparison site to help consumers find available apartments from a range of sources in one place. The startup launched two months ago based on the firm belief that the growth of the holiday apartment sector and the multitude of existing agencies warranted a comparison site to bring it all together. The startup is breaking into a sizeable market with vacation rental turnover more than $85bn annually if take both the US and Europe into account and an estimated of 3.9m houses to rent worldwide. Apartum sees competition from three avenues and makes the following observations:

Asia-based Wego, a hotel and flight comparison site that launched last February in the vacation rental division. Wego is a general travel site but does not specialize in the holiday apartments sector. It currently works with five general agencies whereas apartum already compares 10 agencies. The Wego model is the most similar to ours of all competitors.

Likibu, a small, French player which provides few details about the apartments and we believe their way of presenting the apartments is not what a customer is looking for.

Apartmentdistrict, a small quite similar Spanish player but with a different business model (they manage the booking and the customers pay them the prepayment). It shows European small agencies and has a total of 50,000 apartments while apartum compares more than 300,000 apartments. One advantage of this site is it has a blog and other content that is useful to customers; with more time and money we hope to develop similar tools for apartum. We do not consider this website our direct competition because the booking process is totally different.

Apartum is based on a pay-per-click system. The agency only pays us for each visitor redirected to their site. Each visitor is of great value to the agency as they are already interested in the property having selected it on the apartum site. In the case of a customer visiting multiple properties from the same agency, the payment will only be taken once. Should the customer carry out additional searches in the same destination within a period of less than 30 days, the agency will not incur additional costs. Agency providers are granted access to the administration panel where they are able to see the total number of incoming clicks/users at any time.

Chief executive and product manager Sergi Villaubi, whose background is in programming, web design and online marketing, leads the apartum team. He's joined by Lorenzo Ritella, marketing manager, Manuel Angel Rodriguez, consultant. The startup is currently seeking business angels for funding and has also applied to some startups accelerator programs.

Describe what your start-up does, what problem it solves (differently to what is already out there) and for whom? In the market there are many agencies that offer apartments and almost nobody for comparing all available offer and display it in one page. Why should people or companies use your startup? Apartum simplifies the search process for tourist rental apartments, giving the customer the opportunity to compare the best available apartments from a variety of agencies at once, on one page and with just one search. It's an easier, quicker and more comfortable experience for the user. The main advantage of apartum for the customer is that you no longer have to open multiple web pages to find the best value apartment, and displays results from many holiday apartment agencies in one simple, easy-to use search. Apartum offers apartments in all the world's major tourist destinations such as Paris, Rome, Barcelona, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Miami, Buenos Aires and many more. For users Apartum is completely free. This site highlights the trend that tourists now prefer to stay in apartments rather than hotels, as this allows for privacy, independence and, above all, they are normally cheaper. Apartum currently works with the best agencies from across the world such as TripAdvisor-owned Flipkey, HouseTrip, FriendlyRentals, Only-apartments, Interhome, WayToStay, Directstay, as well as other local agencies such as Apartmentbarcelona, ShBarcelona, comparing more than 300,000 apartments worldwide. Other than going viral and receiving mountains of positive PR, what is the strategy for raising awareness and getting customers/users? Depending on our growth we will be able to dedicate more time and money into marketing, social media and PR with the aim to make apartum known to customers. We need the customers to know the advantages of comparing before choosing. Apartum will be successful because it follows a trend of success in a growing market. Users highly value the possibility of comparing between various options and it was not possible in the holiday apartments sector until now. Apartum is born of this need. How did your initial idea evolve? Were there changes/any pivots along the way? What other options have you considered for the business if the original vision fails? Apartum was launched 2 months ago, but we have been working on it for the past 6 months. Our business vision has not changed from the first idea. Where do you see yourselves in 3 years time, what specific challenges do you hope to have overcome? The desire and motivation to go ahead with apartum daily and to make continuous improvements. In three years we want to be the reference comparison site for vacation rental and we will not rest until we achieve this. We think about specific challenges like ways to gain more traffic, more partners, improvements to be made on the web. We always want to have more happy users talking about us, and we already receive emails from happy customers who are pleased with apartum. Apartum is our dream, so while we sleep, we work! What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that requires another startup to help it out? Market trends of travel, tourism and hospitality have an increasing number of search sites which have made consumers value search even more. Websites like Trivago have radically changed the way to book a hotel, while other sites like Kayak compare prices for flights, car insurance and credit cards. Now Apartum, the first comparison site for tourist apartments, can be added to the list. Tnooz view:

Trying to find a holiday apartment is a consumer's nightmare, the sector is highly fragmented between a few known brands, listing sites and home-owner direct services. There is light at the end of the tunnel as technology is beginning to bring the sector together. Phocuswright research published last year on European vacation rental highlighted consumer dissatisfaction with the shopping and booking experience so aggregating it all can only be a good thing. But, it needs to be slick. There has already been land-grab from the big boys in the past two years as they seek further inventory and commercial opportunities and the likes of TripAdvisor have done meta for flights and hotels so why not vacation rental. Apartum's proposition seems simple and it says it's bringing on additional content/agencies on a weekly basis so it will be a question of marketing dollars to ensure it gets in front of enough eyeballs. It freely admits there is more work to be done on the site but perhaps one small thing the startup might address is the flashing pictures on the results pages which seem quite distracting. However, it will be interesting to watch this site grow and see the reaction from existing players - at very least apartum is addressing a need.

Snap poll [poll id="105"]