HomeToGo: A New Search Engine for Holiday Rentals

CEO and co-founder Dr. Patrick Andrä of HomeToGo shares his insights on building a travel startup and the drive behind his new search engine for vacation rentals.

Dr. Patrick Andrä is part of our Travel Massive Berlin chapter and has agreed to share with us his insights into building and growing a travel startup.

What is your start-up about?

HomeToGo is a search engine for travelers who want to spend more time on their vacations than on searching for the best vacation rental. Our search engine is for travellers who are picky about where they’d like to stay and want to find the perfect accommodation without breaking the bank. We’re headquartered in a beautiful former power station in Berlin and currently operate in 9 European markets and the US.

What gap did you find in the travel industry that inspired you to create this startup?

We found the vacation rentals market very fragmented. Until recently, finding and booking a vacation rental has been a time-consuming process, involving switching between different vacation rental websites. To make matters worse a lot of properties are listed on more than one website and have different price structures.

So in 2014 I founded HomeToGo together with Wolfgang Heigl and Nils Regge. HomeToGo is meant to simplify the search, so users can instantly compare over 3 million vacation rentals from over 150 providers in one place.

How did you build your founding team?

Together with my two co-founders Nils Regge and Wolfgang Heigl, we have developed the idea to create a metasearch engine that would close the gap in this very fragmented market. We as the founding team combine technical expertise and knowledge in travel technology, tourism and e-commerce which helped us determine the need for our startup. Wolfgang Heigl previously founded the leading German flight comparison website Swoodoo, later acquired by KAYAK (now part of the Priceline Group). Nils Regge founded the vacation rental portal Casamundo which was later sold to the Dutch @Leisure group. I previously led business development for the leading European online furniture retailer Home24.

How is your startup disrupting the travel scene today?

One of HomeToGo’s aims is to make the travel market more transparent by putting all available offers in closer proximity to one another. This will help consumers get a better deal but will also encourage the providers to compete on quality and value rather than advertising dollar.

Unlike our international competitors, at HomeToGo we’re also able to match duplicate properties, listing just one search result for one property, but giving the rates from all partners. This is very handy considering different websites often charge different prices.

How is your startup changing the future of the industry or helping to make travel better?

HomeToGo’s metasearch engine does not only provide users with the best results due to the ability of matching duplicate properties, it also makes the search kindly convenient by offering intuitive filters, a map search and many other highly developed features. Users can experience and enjoy the search for a vacation rental more than suffering from waiting and comparing time.

Travel Start-Up is a monthly series that profiles unique online travel start-ups in the Travel Massive community around the world. Connect with HomeToGo via Travel Massive, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and Twitter.