If you have been travelling around Asia and you are looking for alternatives to the normal hotel stays, chances are you might have heard about peer to peer property renting website travelmob.
Founded in 2012, travelmob is a social marketplace where travelling “Guests” can locate and book cool places owned by local “Hosts” in Asia Pacific. As long as you own a property, you can rent it out to someone else and earn extra cash. These property spaces can be an extra cozy room, a cool loft or even a private villa. Similarly, when you travel around in Asia, you can choose to stay at someone else’s house, condominium, or even villas.
Peer to peer property renting website has gained an immense popularity lately because guests can develop real connections with their hosts, live like a local and immerse themselves in the culture of their destination.
There are currently over 20,000 properties available for rental through travelmob now, and we heard they have a houseboat available for rent too:
Other than booking your accommodation online, travelmob recently just released their mobile app, where users can easily search for and book the properties you like on the go.
Here’s how the new mobile app looks like:
According to the email sent by the travelmob team, the new mobile app allows its customer to discover the best accommodations in Asia Pacific “right at your fingertips or manage your reservations on the go”.
Here’s what you can do with the app:
travelmob’s CEO Turochas Fuad shared with technology blog e27 that for the past three months, over 15 per cent of its bookings have come from iOS devices.
“We recognise that more than a third of our users are accessing our site through mobile devices, with more than 60 per cent of them on the iOS platform. With the Travelmob iOS app, we are able to give our users a mobile-optimised Travelmob experience to locate, communicate, book and manage properties”. – Turochas Fuad
The new mobile app is only available on iOS. There are no news about Android yet.
Of course, while the company has been growing and was recently acquired by US based HomeAway, one of the bigger issue around peer to peer home renting is this: is it legal?
No, it is not legal, at least in Singapore.
Lai Weichang, an user for popular Question & Answer site Quora gave an excellent response to whether or not these peer to peer renting site is legal in Singapore:
Of course, that did not stop platforms such as Airbnb or travelmob from growing and providing their service to those that find value in them.
Read also: Airbnb user account “hacked” for one week, payment system issues?