Twenty-nine-year-old James Asquith, a London banker who had visited all 196 countries by the age of 24, recently launched Holiday Swap, an app which aims to get people to swap homes with other people when they travel.
“You have a picture of a property and you swipe,” Mr Asquith told Business Insider. “A lot of people who’ve used it said ‘I feel like I’m on Tinder’.”
However, unlike Tinder, Holiday Swap works on a global rather than local scale, meaning you can see properties on the more than 40 countries across the six continents the app currently covers.
Mr Asquith added that you can filter your settings “for things like ‘I want a place with a good atmosphere or a young crowd’, by country or whatever”.
When someone “matches” with you, you get a notification and a “pin” added to your map, as well as the ability to chat to the user and see their availability calendar.
“Then you basically have that connection,” Mr Asquith said. “Say you’re going away for a week – you might look at your map have 30 cool places [you can go], but the people as well.”
It’s only $1 (£0.70p) per bed a night to swap through the app and the users can also request a fully refundable deposit if it makes them more comfortable, money which the app protects.
“If you’re swapping a place but you want to protect against them cancelling on you or you want to protect against damage or whatever, everything is covered on home insurance, but it’s beyond that as well,” he said. “We keep the deposit fee in a third party account then it’s all returned when it’s done.”
The new app is now available on both iOS and Android and Mr Asquith says some users have already started swapping.
When Business Insider checked out the app, it was clear that a proportion of the profiles are fake.
Mr Asquith said these are leftovers from an earlier testing process and are being phased out. He added that profiles are manually vetted, rather than automatically with ID checking like with Airbnb. If a profile doesn’t meet the site standards, the moderation team will suspend the account.
