Revyoos
Revyoos is the first review aggregator for short-term rentals. It automates review collection from multiple channels and platforms including Airbnb, Booking, Vrbo, Tripadvisor and direct bookings.
Launched in June 2020, Revyoos wants to help property managers and owners improve their credibility, SEO and conversion and give them control over their reviews.
What is your 30-second pitch to investors?
Reviews are one of the most important factors in terms of reputation and booking conversion. Unlike in the hotel industry, in the short-term rental industry, reviews are currently out of our control, split over multiple channels and listing sites making it complex for property managers and owners to get the most out of them.
Revyoos is the only all-in-one review aggregator for vacation and short-term rentals. It’s an easy-to-use platform with a customizable widget that helps property managers and owners improve their credibility, SEO and conversion and gives them control over their reviews.
Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.
Revyoos automatically collects all your reviews from the big four - Airbnb, Booking, VRBO and Tripadvisor - as well as from Facebook, with more platforms to come. In addition, a property manager or owner can upload in bulk reviews from other sources and also ask for reviews from direct bookers.
The aggregated reviews can be used as social proof on a property manager's own website through the Revyoos widget, and, depending on their preferences or terms and conditions of any OTA, can either display the full content or only the average review rating. The number of reviews can be selected.
The main benefits are:
Trust: Showing a star rating from trustworthy sources is definitely a trust and confidence generator.
SEO: Revyoos includes Rich Snippets that allow the ability to display star ratings in Google and increases click-through rate (CTR).
Conversion: The combination of more website traffic and trust created by the reviews is a powerful conversion booster.
But there is more: The dashboard allows for the ability to internally filter, search and analyze bad reviews - detecting patterns that can be improved upon. The general review score can be used as a KPI to track performance at a global level, and this evolves over time.
Revyoos also keeps a backup copy of every single past review, so that whatever happens with the reviews on any OTA, the reviews will always remain on the dashboard, and therefore available to the property manager.
Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.
- Strengths: Revyoos is an entirely new product for the short-term rental industry and therefore uniquely brings value to property managers, property owners and guests at the same time. Our team is also multi-disciplined with deep knowledge of the short-term rental industry, tech and digital transformation.
- Weaknesses: Our biggest weakness is that all new products need time to raise awareness and be adopted.
- Opportunities: For Revyoos to become a reference in terms of review aggregation and the acknowledged trusted label for the short-term rental industry and its guests. It’s also a great time to market at the moment because property managers and owners are really looking to have more control over their business. Revyoos is also very easy to integrate with other software companies, such as property management systems, so we can scale rapidly.
- Threats: During the COVID-19 threat, many property managers and owners have reduced their investment in marketing and may be more reluctant to try new solutions, although we are not finding that to be the case so far.
What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?
- The first is the authenticity of reviews. Sixty-eight percent of customers question their authenticity, and with Revyoos, potential guests can easily see that reviews come from genuine and trusted sources.
- Currently, reviews are split over many listing sites and OTAs and this is out of our control. For instance, according to the Rentals United Tech Report of 2020, property managers publish their properties on an average of eight different channels.
- Increasing direct traffic to your own website is a strenuous task. However, showing your star rating on Google can improve your CTR by up to 35%, but to do so, you need to implement Rich Snippets.
So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?
At Revyoos, we definitely think that partnerships are the best way to bring more value to the short-term rental ecosystem. One of our main objectives to market our platform and reach as many customers as possible is to partner with property management software and other tech providers. Revyoos can easily integrate by API and we are convinced that we bring a perfect complement to other tech companies and add value to both their customers and ours.
Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.
Revyoos began as a personal need as one of our co-founders was first a property owner and then a property manager. He knew he needed to get the most out of his reviews on his own website and increase booking conversion. With this in mind, and also with the objective to get more control over reviews, we looked for solutions on review aggregation (something which is commonplace in other industries such as with hotels), but there was no platform that 100% specialized in short-term rentals.
Before launching Revyoos to the market we talked to many short term rental experts, property managers and owners and especially counted on the incredible expertise of AJL Atelier that helped us to better fine tune our MVP, have a closer market fit and size our addressable market.
How and when will you make money?
Revyoos was conceived before COVID, but born in COVID times. We were initially going to charge for the product starting July 1, but in support of the recovery of the short-term rental industry, we launched in beta testing for free for the first three months which proved very successful. We are now charging for the use of our platform. Our business model is based on monthly recurring revenue with a monthly fee per property including discounts according to the number of properties.
What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?
Revyoos is co-founded by CEO Christophe Salmon, a property manager and ex-digital marketing executive, and CTO Angel Arcos, a tech startup veteran specializing in developing global online products and services using cloud technology and AI processes. The team is joined by digital advisor Pedro Diaz, who brings more than 25 years of experience in digital transformation. The team have all worked together in previous employment.
How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?
We are currently a reduced team but diversity and inclusion is definitely something we have front of mind and will certainly take into account as we grow.
What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?
It is no secret that one of the top three factors of success in a startup is the team, so the most difficult part was to ensure the company started with the best team possible. A good idea without an excellent team and perfect execution is nothing! Christophe had a vision for Revyoos for a few years before co-founding the company with Angel and then bringing onboard Pedro as digital advisor. This has turned out to be the best team for this awesome journey!
Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact - so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?
We are absolutely convinced that we are covering a gap that was missing in our industry. While we were finishing our beta version, we registered for the VrTech Awards, a competition that aims to celebrate the most innovative young startups in the vacation rental industry. Revyoos was nominated as a finalist, as voted by the industry, which was for us the best proof of concept ever.
A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?
In one year we will have added new features to our platform to bring even more value to our customers. This will include new sources to automatically collect more genuine reviews from trustworthy sources and also work on the dashboard so property managers can receive more business information from their reviews.
We will also have reached key partnerships agreements with other tech companies as review aggregation becomes a known concept in our industry.
What is your end-game? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)
Our end-game is to bring neutral trust and credibility to short-term rental professionals by aggregating genuine customer reviews from all the different distribution channels and platforms. The vision of our “Revyoos Rating Score” is to become the standard for genuine guest reviews in the short-term rental industry, as Reviewpro’s Global Review Score is for the hotel industry.
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