Friend-to-Friend accommodation site launches

SEE VIDEO HOW IT WORKS:

Private community lets users access friends and friends of friends worldwide accommodation

Launching this month, Staysatfriends.com, is a new friend-to-friend accommodation website.  Staysatfriends.com enables its users to access one another’s accommodation all over the world by creating a private community with their friends, and their friends of friends.

Staysatfriends.com says that it ensures maximum security and privacy, as well as being a free service, with the flexibility to swap, loan or rent properties.  It is easy to use and navigate having been in beta stage until now, and thoroughly tested over the past 2 years.  Staysatfriends.com has been founded by five, international entrepreneurs, with technological and hospitality backgrounds.

The features of Staysatfriends.com are designed to make it easy and intuitive to invite friends to join the private community and to start seeing properties populate on a map of travel opportunities.  Users simply manage their calendar of availability for their friends to discover when is the right opportunity to rent (or borrow) their home. 

In a survey undertaken by the website 38% of participants have used a friend’s or relative’s home for their holidays with 60% of these systematically retuning to the same friend’s place, highlighting the trend for peer-to-peer accommodation.  Be it due to the recession or the ‘Collaborative Consumption*’ theory the trend for friend-to-friend accommodation is on the rise.  Staysatfriends.com offers a wealth of accommodation which can now be easily accessed privately via users address books or with Facebook Connect.

Says Arnaud Marze, Founder of Staysatfriends.com "Our vision with Staysatfriends.com is to be the first alternative people turn to when they want to organize their travel.  People are already staying at each others houses, so we wanted to make this an easier way to make that happen and increase the destinations available."

"With Stays@Friends, we expect to see a subtle shift in the way people consume travel – our usual clientele isn’t driven purely by price, rather by comfort, convenience, trust and adventure. "

"We certainly don’t see all trips being taken at Stays@Friends properties. Rather, by saving on accommodation and restaurant costs on some trips, we expect to see our members using those savings in other ways – more frequent trips, eating out, business class flights rather than economy, staying at better hotels for longer when hotels are used, and so on." 

"However, we know that price is a major factor for some people – if we can also make time away more affordable for the 30% of Britons who currently can’t stretch to an annual holiday, then that’s a benefit not only for them, but for the travel industry  as a whole."

Staysatfriends.com is launching this month with a skiing competition where participants can sign up to win over €3,000 of ski accessories, passes and accommodation.

See: http://www.staysatfriends.com/

Valere Tjolle

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