Hotels are reinventing themselves and exploring alternative revenue streams in the face of the short-term disappearance of international tourists. From proposing overnight stays for Barcelona residents with dinner and breakfast included to preparing their rooms for teleworking and meetings. The latest proposal consists of entering the rental market, offering rooms for long stays. Badi, a platform for renting rooms in shared flats, has decided to bet on this path and will make about 400 hotel rooms available to its users.
[subscribe_newsletter_esp]
The startup is about to close agreements with different hotel chains to transform their rooms into long-term rental mode and does not yet want to specify which establishments it will offer or where they are located. The founder and CEO of Badi, Carlos Pierre, explains that the pandemic has considerably increased the available supply of rooms for rent, both from individuals who have started renting those they have empty at home and from hotels or tourist apartments. All of them are looking for a way to obtain more income as a result of covid-19, which has caused a deep health, economic and social crisis.
For Pierre, this initiative means facilitating a transformation in the business model of hotels, creating a new type of client and using their assets in a more efficient way. "This alliance allows the introduction of a new future tool that will contribute to energizing a sector that is cyclically suffering severely the consequences of the current crisis," remarks Pierre. "Thanks to our technology, hotels will be able to expand, diversify and de-seasonalize their offer," he adds. Specifically, the Barcelona platform points out that hotel chains can allocate up to 20% of their rooms to rent.
Badi will thus expand its catalog of services and will move to a hybrid accommodation model, with private rooms in shared flats and hotel rooms. "We are a young and dynamic company. Therefore, our structure allows us to have enough agility to adapt our strategy very quickly to the trends we detect at any given moment," explains Pierre. This new type of product also means for the platform to advance towards coliving, taking advantage of the fact that hotels offer the option of being able to sleep, work and eat in the same place.
Foresees a new round for next year
Founded in 2015, Badi, known as the Tinder of flatmates, employs about 100 workers, all of them in Barcelona, after the startup had to backtrack on its plan to open offices in New York and has centralized in the Catalan capital the staff it had in Berlin and London due to the coronavirus crisis
The pandemic has also coincided with the tests it has started to do to monetize part of its activity, with the creation of special services for those who want to rent their rooms, such as making their ads more visible than others or a recommendation system for potential tenants.
For next year, it hopes to be able to hire more people and open a new round of financing. Since its launch, the platform has managed to raise 45 million dollars in five rounds of financing led by investment funds from the United States, such as Goodwater Capital, obtaining a total of 30 million dollars in the last one it made.