When you travel, how do you decide where to stay? Do you go the hotel route? Airbnb? Find friends’ couches to crash on?
Whatever your method, chances are pretty good that you use the internet to figure out where you’re going to lay your head. While a few sites have emerged to dominate the market – Airbnb and TripAdvisor spring immediately to mind – there are more options out there than you’ve probably of.
A different kind of home sharing platform.
Airbnb has popularized the term sharing economy, even though at this point the amount of “sharing” that happens in a lot of those rentals is negligible. Then, of course, there’s Couchsurfing, which has brought together all of my hippie friends with other hippies around the world for years now.
In the space between where Airbnb can be costly and Couchsurfing can be sketchy, Trampolinn is making a name.
This French startup has a new approach to home sharing: a points system that rewards opening up your own home.
Trampolinn hosts can offer some part of their house – a couch, a room, even the whole thing – and when people choose to come stay with them, they earn points. Those points can subsequently exchanged for free stays in other people’s spare rooms/apartments/couches anywhere in the world.
The site is also open to a wider variety of travelers than traditional home swapping platforms, which require that both parties be interested in the each other’s houses in order for a deal to go through. Because Trampolinn uses a points-based system, everyone from single travelers to families to couples living in a whole variety of places can take advantage of their service.
And people are loving it.
Over the past eight months, Trampolinn has shown impressive growth by adding more than 12,000 new members in Europe. They’ve opened offices in Paris and Barcelona and are poised to start expanding into the US market as well.
In order to fund that expansion, Trampolinn is currently raising a second round of funding. Investors interested in jumping on board should check out their site. And, of course, travelers looking for a new way to find places to stay should too!
