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What’s new for short term rentals in 2013? Airbnb, 9flats, Roomorama and travelmob share

e27 speaks to key players in the short-term rental industry to find out how did they do in 2012, what are their main plans in 2013, and what are their thoughts on competition.

Personally, one of the biggest industry disruption over the last few years is the short-term rental space. Pioneered by Airbnb, short-term rental websites which allow homeowners to list their properties for short-term rentals have managed to help homeowners earn extra income and generated thousands of jobs. In Southeast Asia, while we were slow to pick up the trend, that did not stop players such as Roomorama or travelmob from setting up their businesses to ride on the trend. While short-term rental websites might be illegal in some countries such as Singapore, 2012 has no doubt been a great year for these companies. To quantify this, we spoke to Airbnb, Roomorama, travelmob and 9flats.

How was 2012?

Airbnb: Airbnb has grown incredibly fast in Southeast Asia in 2012. In 2012, total nights booked on Airbnb increased 400% in Indonesia, 275% in Thailand, 547% in Malaysia, and 345% in the Philippines. Roomorama: 2012 has been a pivotal year for us as our main goal was and still is to consolidate our position in the B2C space of the short-term rental industry (as opposed to peer-to-peer). To do so we merged with Lofty.com and subsequently raised an undisclosed amount of money from VCs. The result is that we are now capable to grow our inventory at a much faster pace than ever before and empower Roomorama users with the fastest and most seamless way to book professionally managed short-term apartments and villas worldwide. In terms of results, 2012 was a pretty good year for us. We have grown our inventory to 80,000 units and we expect to quadruple this number by the end of 2013. travelmob: 2012 has been fantastic – we publicly launched travelmob in July 2012 and since then, have made tremendous progress as a company. A couple of milestones: We’ve hired a solid team, we’ve closed our seed round of funding led by Jungle Ventures and Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Accel Partners, we announced a distribution partnership with Wego and of course, we launched several new features to further enhance user experience on the site.