STARTUP STAGE: The Plum Guide wants to be the Michelin Guide for vacation rentals

The Plum Guide

Founded in 2016, the Plum Guide is a curated collection of vacation rentals that meet its rigorous “Perfect Stay Test” that evaluates properties based on more than 150 criteria – everything from smell to shower pressure to Wi-Fi speed.

The company employs a network of home critics and photographers that meet with the owners of selected properties to create copy and images for listings. The company started in London and now also offers rentals in Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Milan and Rome. 

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

The Plum Guide is the Michelin Guide for vacation rentals. Solving for the lack of quality control and choice overload in the urban home share space, the Plum Guide bypasses an increasingly-flawed user review system by individually visiting and vetting thousands of vacation homes and selecting roughly one in every 100 tested to join the elite collection, with highly curated, stylish (and accurate) listings.

To make it onto the collection, each property is put through its paces via the rigorous and proprietary Plum Home Test, which consists of over 150 criteria and leverages a unique combination of big data and expert human curation. The ambition is to select only homes that have all the ingredients for a great stay – weeding out the sub-optimal and removing the hit-and-miss of home rentals. It's Michelin Guide-level scrutiny, but for vacation homes.

What inspired you to create this company?

The Plum Guide was inspired by a mind-blowing Airbnb experience in Tel Aviv. What was curious to us was that nothing indicated it would be anything special: it was cheap, available at the last minute and had suspiciously few bookings and reviews. We arrived and were genuinely blown away - by home and host.

The home was beautifully designed, with a huge outdoor terrace overlooking the sea. The host gave an unbelievably warm welcome: he’d stocked the fridge with organic fresh local produce; he’d placed vases of fresh flowers in all the rooms; he brought his own home-made hummus to the home each morning for us; he even revealed that the living room had been specially designed to be conducive to great conversations.

This host was different. He’d put thought into every small detail in the home. He was 10 times more inspired than any professional hotelier we had worked with at our agency Promise Communities. So it got us thinking: Were there more of these superhosts out there? And if so, why couldn’t we tell from the reviews what was going to be an average stay and what was a winning ticket?

We delved deeper, reached out and met with hosts in London, Paris, Milan and Barcelona. The answer? Yes, there was a new breed of host emerging. They were the new hoteliers - people who were plugged into their local scene, who were incredibly creative, who loved design, interiors and architecture and sharing their local city’s culture with guests. But yes, it was impossible to tell from the listings who the diamonds were. They were utterly lost in the sea of options out there. So we set ourselves the challenge: to create a collection of the world’s best holiday homes, so that guests no longer have to play the lottery on their holiday. We believe we can guarantee a winning ticket every time.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

Strengths

• Quality product (our highly vetted inventory of vacation homes) and a personalized, handheld superior booking experience via our ‘MatchMakers’ set the Plum Guide proposition apart
• A customer satisfaction score in the top 1% of the hospitality industr
• Intelligence, in that we collect more information for the homes (500+ data points) than any other so if they want to know the make of the mattress or the brand of smoothie maker in the kitchen, we can give them the answe
• A strong foundation for why we do what we do. The Plum Guide Test comes from mountains of market research, industry expert insights and even psychological analysis. It’s why it resonates so well with our users.

Weaknesses

• While we’re rapidly expanding and the response in each new market has been exceptional, we’re still not in every city we’d like to be yet.
• Our business model is one that requires a manual, detail-orientated approach we will never compromise on, so we’re looking to expand to a new city every month.
• Though we have a wide range and some very approachable inventory, the average home is at a higher price point than other sites, so we’re probably not the right option for traveler on a severe budget (college backpackers for example).

Opportunities

• We know there is fatigue and frustration within this space, especially for a discerning traveler. Too much to sift through and folks getting fed up with bad hosts or misleading listings is something we aim to solve with our updated approach.
• Also, the ever-present desire for genuine and authentic experiences in travel works to our advantage and was of careful consideration.
• Our homes and homeowners combine for some truly memorable hospitality experiences in some of the world’s most historic and sought after neighborhoods. You can feel it from our Plum Stories series where we tell the in-depth story of four of our favorite homes in the new cities. 

Threats

• We realize we’re not the only player in the space and some have larger inventory or more name recognition, but we’re confident that both our experience and product speak volumes in comparison and will cut through a noisy travel category.
• Global financial activity can always have an effect on luxury travel brands and are beyond our control.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

The Plum Guide is all about solving two problems encountered by every single person who tries to book a holiday home: choice overload and a lack of quality control. There are so many booking platforms out there (Airbnb, HomeAway, Booking.com, TripAdvisor etc..) that it's hard to separate the good from the great.

What makes The Plum Guide unique is our army of expert Home Critics, who visit each home in person and conduct an exhaustive two-hour home test, covering over 150 different criteria. The ambition is to test every home worth its mettle that's advertised online for short-term rent in each city - and to handpick only the top 1%.

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

We’ve found that when people use the Plum Guide they have a hard time keeping their mouth closed about it. The experience is one thing and all others pale in comparison, but even more so is the quality of the homes on the platform. When you find that ultimate home, in the perfect neighborhood with hosts that really take hosting to the next level, you’re naturally going to share that experience.

From a marketing perspective, we invest heavily into driving in more affluent users (e.g. bidding heavily on “luxury” related terms, also bidding more heavily on affluent demographics), which mass market platforms are less focused on. Brand marketing plays a key role, with incentivized referral schemes for both customers and hosts, a dedicated repeats program and PR and content strategy that doubles down on our positioning as the leading authority on home-stays and our “Science behind the Perfect Stay” IP.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

As folks who use travel booking websites and interact with other travelers often it was pretty clear to us that there were growing problems and ones not being solved by the current crop of platforms out there. and it confirmed our suspicion that a segment of the travel audience was looking for a more refined experience for vacation rental bookings.

How and when will you make money?

We take a cut of the overall booking fee, in line with other booking platform fees.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team, and why do you have what it takes to succeed with this business?

Doron Meyassed is our founder and CEO. Prior to Plum, Doron co-founded Promise Communities, a company specializing in building online communities for some of the world leading brands. In eight years it grew to a 130 person agency delivering communities for the likes of Twitter, Samsung, Sony Music, McDonald's, British Airways, Diageo, Pepsi Co and Spotify. In 2012 the business was sold to Omnicom.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

The belief among investors that the Airbnb monopoly meant there was no space for viable challenger brands in this sector. We're already a long way to proving them wrong – with 700% growth last year and 300% growth this year - and we're very happy to have brought on one of the investors who turned us down in our last round in our Series A.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact - so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?

We’ve hit upon a formula to deliver genuine customer satisfaction in an industry rife with disappointment and mistrust. The mature and discerning customer out there is deeply underserved by the existing players in the market.