After successfully launching in the US, Lodgify, a travel technology start-up based in Barcelona, is now offering its Website Builder to European and Asian holiday rental owners.
Lodgify enables holiday rental owners to easily create a website with a “Book now” button and manage their reservations. Lodgify’s vision is to increase bookings generated directly via the owner’s website, and help owners to become less dependent on commission-based listing sites and online travel agencies. 
“Many European holiday rental businesses do not have their own functional website yet, even though we have learned from comparable sectors, such as the hotel industry, that this channel can account for 10-20% of bookings. That is a missed opportunity and we’d like to change that,” says Marco De Gregorio, Co-founder of Lodgify.
Naveen Sharma: Adding more Asian language options
Co-founder and head of marketing and business development, Naveen Sharma said that in Asia, its current customers are mainly single-property owners who own one to five holiday homes (primarily users from Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia (Bali), Australia, New Zealand) but also larger property managers who operate 15-50+ properties there.
“Our software already handles certain features (f.e. worldwide currencies, PayPal credit card transactions etc.) which makes our SaaS usable worldwide already.
“In terms of expanding to Asia and expanding our customer base, we are regularly adding more language options to our solution, in order to attract more Asian users and enable them to display their website in their own local language.
“We already have added Japanese, based on a client request, and are currently adding Chinese (Mandarin first, then Cantonese) and Korean. As a start-up, our marketing activities are obviously limited, but we will be focusing to create some partnerships in Asia in order to benefit from organic growth.”
Earlier in 2014, Lodgify was selected as one of the winners of Seedcamp London, Europe’s leading accelerator and mentoring programme. Since then, Lodgify has been regularly adding features and is now offering its software and customer support in three additional languages i.e. Spanish, Italian and German.
“The European holiday rental market has evolved into a $42 billion industry. However, it still underserved in terms of innovative and affordable technology for accommodation owners,” says De Gregorio. “Being a European team based in Barcelona, we would like to offer our technology to European holiday rental businesses in their own language.”
Lodgify offers scalable subscription plans based on a monthly fee for both holiday rental owners and managers with 1 to 500+ properties. The software-as-a-service includes mobile-friendly website templates, an online booking engine, reservation system and channel manager. Lodgify’s booking engine integrates with both Stripe and Paypal.
