Love Home Swap, a U.K.-based startup that appeals to homeowners that want to trade their places, is getting into proper rentals. The company, which launched about a year and a half ago, was operating on a member subscription model. People would pay to get access to a network of homeowners that were open to swapping residences across 150 different countries, plus a travel team, personal concierge and travel guides. Now the company, which just raised $ 1.3 million from MMC Ventures, is offering rentals along with swaps. Swaps are, of course, free to members. With rentals, Love Home Swap will take a 12 percent service fee. If you’re a gold member, it’s 11 percent and for Platinum members, it’s 10 percent. On the hosting side, the company will take a 3 percent service fee, which drops to 2 percent for Gold members and 1 percent from Platinum members. Love Home Swap also pairs each transaction with an insurance policy from Hiscox to protect members against damages or theft. Rentals are a natural move for the company, as nearly two-thirds of members said they would be interested in rentals. It adds a different revenue model to the subscription business. Normally, Love Home Swap charges anywhere from roughly $ 15 a month to $ 42 per month to belong to its club, depending on the tier of service you want. At the top level, they get a concierge service that helps with restaurant and flight bookings. That business has helped Love Home Swap grow revenues by 37 percent and triple traffic since funding was closed in December of last year. The company just acquired 1stHomeExchange, to add 23,000 listings. Love Home Swap doesn’t really consider itself a direct competitor to San Francisco’s Airbnb. It positions itself as a service that caters to higher-end customers that are a bit older, own property and have the ability to go on holiday more often. The company points to listings like a six-bedroom house in Koh Samui, Thailand or a five-bedroom chateau in Brittany. The average age of their customer is 46 and they’re predominantly female. It’s split 50 percent between families while 21 percent are couples with no kids and 18 percent are empty nesters. The rest are independent travellers. About a third of the properties on the site are vacation homes, not primary residences. Another competitor in an even higher tier of the market is Inspirato, which
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Tag Archives: Rentals
Love Home Swap, The Members Club For Swapping Houses, Gets Into Rentals
Amazon Kindle ebook rentals take the time out of reading
A First Look At Silvercar, The Future Of Airport Car Rentals
I’ve had high hopes for Silvercar to provide an alternative to the typical horrible experience of airport car rental. It sounds like a great idea. But it’s difficult to judge the quality of a service without actually trying it out, right? So I took a trip down to DFW for the day and demoed the Silvercar experience for myself.
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Parku Looks To Make Parking Spot Rentals Mobile-Friendly In Europe
Now that Airbnb and Uber have dramatically changed the markets for providing rides and temporary space, it’s natural that we’re seeing variants of their models being applied in other spaces. Parking seems like a natural place, since there is plenty of unused inventory in urban cities. There have been a few attempts at the space in the U.S. through companies like Parking Panda. A Swiss startup called Parku is also attacking the concept. Because their local market is so expensive and supply-constrained, they believe they have a good chance at making this idea work. Co-founder Christian Oldendorff says there are as many as 250,000 privately registered cars that roll around Zurich every day. Even though there are 220,000 private parking spaces available, only 50,000 or so are freely available. On-street parking is almost fully occupied while the cost of renting a parking space per month can range from 250 to 1,000 Swiss francs every month ($ 273 to 1095). It’s a lot more than what you would find in a city like San Francisco, where parking spots in coveted neighborhoods range from $ 200 to $ 300 a month. Like with U.S.-based rivals, you can book spaces on the website or through a mobile app for certain days and hours. They’re hoping to scale up to 400-800 parking spaces soon within Zurich, and then expand more broadly within Europe. Because parking is so expensive locally in Switzerland, even as few as 350 parking spaces could produce a revenue run-rate of more than 1.3 million Swiss francs ($ 1.4 million) a year, the company says. In the U.S., Parking Panda has worked with garages in 73 U.S. cities to offer up to 10,000 parking spaces. Another earlier company, Hello Parking, shut down in 2011 after running into issues with scaling up inventory. That company ran into issues signing up huge garages, which had owners that were reluctant to dramatically increase local supply and drive down prices. Oldendorff says it’s too early to see if his company will run into the same dynamic in Europe.
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Airport Car Rentals: The Next $10 Billion Industry Ready For Disruption
If you travelled by air for the wonderful holiday weekend, you might have been faced with the hell that is the typical airport car rental experience. There are the lines, the hassles, the constant upsells, confusion around cost of gas and insurance, and about 15 pages of paper that you have to sign before being able to pick out your car and leave the lot. Frequent travelers and members of rewards programs aren’t treated that different. They have a shorter line and can generally have a better choice of available cars from the lot, but the experience isn’t fundamentally better.
EE launches EE Film for mobile video rentals (hands-on)
Redbox Instant targets launch by year-end, blends subscription streaming and DVD rentals with VOD
The last concrete details we’d heard about Redbox Instant was that it was entering internal alpha testing, but now Verizon exec Eric Bruno has revealed more background information. Previous info indicated the service would focus more heavily on movies than the back catalog of TV shows that is a part of Netflix Watch Instantly and Amazon Prime Instant Video, and Bloomberg reports Redbox will break with their models by paying its content providers per subscriber cable TV-style, instead of a flat rate decided up front. What customers will get is a monthly subscription and allotment of disc rentals from Redbox’s kiosks, as well as access to VOD movie rentals and downloadable purchases through the service. The alpha test is currently in the hands of about 500 Verizon employees, with plans for a short public test before launching in a late November / mid-December time frame. The main unanswered question however is how much it will all cost, but knowing what we do now — how much are you willing to pay?
Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD
Redbox Instant targets launch by year-end, blends subscription streaming and DVD rentals with VOD originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Sep 2012 03:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google Quietly Launches Google Play Movie Rentals In Germany
Google today quietly rolled out movie rentals in Germany. German Google users have long been able to buy movies through the Play Movies store, but according to German blogger Carsten Knobloch, the rental feature only went live earlier today. So far, Google hasn’t officially announced this launch and the Google Play help page doesn’t acknowledge it either, but a growing number of German users now report that they are able to rent movies from the Play store on the web and on their Android phones.
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Movie rentals ditched 10% during in 1H 2012
Research firm NPD Group has published its latest statistics looking at the movie rental industry for the first half of 2012. According to the statistics, the movie rental industry declined 10% overall during the first half of 2012. The 10% decline is compared to the first half of 2011. NPD says the decline is occurring
Amazon’s got game (and textbook rentals)
Amazon’s ever-growing empire now includes a game-development studio and rentable textbooks. Plus: the government’s latest push for cell phone radiation warning labels.
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CNET News
Disney delays DVD releases to rentals, Netflix
The last major studio not to embargo titles has a 28-day delay in place, which means you’ll have wait a little longer to rent or stream select titles.
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CNET News
‘Hundreds’ of Cablevision iO TV on-demand rentals now last 48 hours, procrastinators rejoice
Last we heard from Cablevision, it was bringing its Optimum Online live TV streaming to Windows and Macs. Shifting directions to its more “traditional” cable offerings, the company now has good news for folks who’ve been generally bummed out about the 24-hour viewing window allotted with movie rentals on its iO TV service. Just in time for your weekend movie marathon, the company has announced that “hundreds” of its on-demand movie rentals will now last for 48 hours with unlimited viewing — huzzah! As usual, content pricing starts at three bucks, and you’ll be pleased to know that all that extra time comes at no additional cost to your subscription. Better yet, the amount of titles part of the deal to grow over time, and you’ll find all the details in the press release after the break. Perhaps most notable is all the time you’ll have to grab more microwaveable popcorn.
‘Hundreds’ of Cablevision iO TV on-demand rentals now last 48 hours, procrastinators rejoice originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 May 2012 02:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Redbox offers free game rentals next week
In an effort to draw attention away from all the digital streaming and distribution news that has been populating the Web lately, kiosk giant Redbox has announced a promotion where customers can get a free one-day video game rental next week. The promotion runs from Sunday to Thursday, and users must book their reservation online [...]
SlashGear
Redbox Raises Price On Rentals To $1.20
This will not end well. Redbox, in position to be the cheap, local, easy alternative to the confusing, troublesome Netflix, has decided to raise its rates to $ 1.20 per day. I guess they wanted a piece of Netflix’s humble pie.
Coinstar, the company that owns the Redbox brand and boxes, explained it this way: “The change is primarily due to the increase in operating expenses, including the recent increase in debit card interchange fees as a result of the Durbin Amendment.” And naturally, that cost should be passed right back onto their loyal customers.
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