The hotel industry worldwide hasn’t been experiencing the best of times in recent years since the introduction of the global success story Airbnb in 2008.
The convenient and practical online hospitality service has grown so rapidly and powerfully that today the company is worth an eye opening $30 billion and has completely transformed the travel industry.
The conflict between the two industries–the disrupter and the disrupted–is what gave birth to Peru-based hotel booking platform Arrivedo, which was founded with the objective to help hotels with their struggles with Airbnb, as well as to give hoteliers a voice while tipping the balance in their favor. They were the first online hotel booking website that also incorporated hotel recommendations.
Arrivedo announced this week the launch of their new hotel meta search feature, which will enable users to search for hotels and most affordable prices based on expertly-written neighborhood guides.
Those neighborhood guides will incorporate a list of articles with maps, routes, restaurants, tours, bars, listicles and more preparing travelers for the trip of their life before they even land in their destinations. These guides will be developed by experienced travel writers with local expertise, enabling travelers to get the authentic advice they seek directly from the place they’ll be staying.
Alonso Franco
“When travelers visit new places, their immediate surroundings can make or break a trip, yet this has been fairly overlooked by previous hotel booking sites. Now with Neighbourhood Guides, customers can ensure their surroundings are filled with exciting activities, thanks to the combined effort of experienced writers and knowledgeable locals,” said Alonso Franco, Peruvian co-founder and CEO of Arrivedo.
One of the features that has made Airbnb so successful is the fact that Airbnb hosts can offer the kind of local experiences that hotels usually weren’t able to. With Arrivedo’s new feature, travellers will have the best of two worlds — deals offered by big-time search engines along with intimately curated experiences.
Everyone at the company is confident that the new feature will play a significant role in helping travelers make more insightful decisions based on location and surrounding activities.
The company has been progressing really well in recent months growing in size at a rate of 67% monthly over the last four months. It now has over 400 local Certified Arrivedo Travel Writers spread around the world.
Arrivedo’s progress would suggest that Peru is reaping the benefits from the Peruvian government’s recent initiatives to boost entrepreneurship in the country, such as Startup Peru, which was established in 2012 and is currently in its sixth installment.