Vacation rental firm GuestReady buys home-sharing platform BnbLord

GuestReady Group, a vacation rental management platform, has recently announced it has bought French home-sharing company, BnbLord, to help become a property solution provider giant for owners, agents, and developers in Europe.

GuestReady, headquartered in Switzerland, declined to disclose the price of the BnbLord acquisition. It recently acquired Oporto City Flats, a short-term rental operator in Portugal, and took over the management of the portfolio of We Stay In Paris. After the rollup, GuestReady manages more than 2,000 properties.

GuestReady, founded in 2016, belongs to a new wave of property managers that automate processes to wring out inefficiencies. It targets the short-term home-rental market with professional services, such as creating listings on Airbnb, Booking.com, HomeAway, and FlipKey, checking in guests and coordinating cleanings. This year, GuestReady began offering business-to-business services to property developers and agents.

“The corporatization of the alternative accommodation sector is continuing at full speed,” said Wouter Geerts, Senior Research Analyst at Skift Research. “Marriott’s partnership with London-based Hostmaker has also shown the potential for future collaborations between hotel players and vacation-rental management companies.” Hostmaker has raised $25 million since its founding in 2014.

The opportunity is significant. Across 28 European countries, travelers spent 1.2 billion room nights in alternative accommodations in 2017, the most recent year for available data from Eurostat. That amounted to 38.7 percent of all lodging room nights, said the European Union’s statistics agency. 

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