World record holder’s US$1-a-night home swapping travel app eyes China market for 2020
- James Asquith holds the Guinness World Record as the youngest person to visit every country in the world
- His house swapping app covers 185 countries and has more than 500,000 users
Holiday Swap, an app that enables users to travel the world through home swapping for just US$1 per night, is experiencing accelerated growth and is eyeing the China market for 2020.
“Asia has been slowly brewing for us, but next year there will be a big focus on what we do in Asia. In January, we are pushing out simplified Chinese,” says Asquith, 29, during a visit to Hong Kong earlier this month.
Hong Kong properties are already listed on the app and he expects to see it gain in popularity in the next year.
“We work on scale. We are not asking people to come and use us and open up their wallets, we are actually solving something without money and enabling them to travel and save money,” says Asquith.
It was while working as an investment banker that Asquith hit on the idea for Holiday Swap. He became aware that much of the time it wasn’t the cost of flights that was stopping people from travelling as much as they might like, it was the accommodation costs when they got there.
He stayed in plenty of hostels when he was travelling in his early 20s. Aside from the affordability factor, one of the key attractions was the fact that hostels were a great place to meet people.
“You do not really need that now because it’s so easy with technology. You do not need to go and sit in a hostel bar to meet people face-to-face like you used to, so why sacrifice your comfort to sleep in a dormitory with 10 people and someone who is randomly blow-drying their hair at 4am?” says Asquith.
“In Latin America you have a universal language in terms of Spanish and Portuguese and in North America its English. But in Asia you have Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam – huge countries with 70, 80 million people and all speaking different languages,” says Asquith.
What has helped accelerate the growth of the app in the last year has been working with tourist boards and airlines to create campaigns that showcase certain destinations. The current campaign is focused on London and New York – two big connecting cities for Holiday Swap.
“I think next year we’re going to be in a place to show off the more off-piste destinations because the bigger ones will work for themselves,” says Asquith.
And in case you are wondering – yes, his own London home is on Holiday Swap. However, he can’t always list it on the app because his plans are constantly changing. This is a man who is always on the move – so far this year he has taken 160 flights, many of them long-haul.
“My schedule is always changing, I don’t want to get a bad rating on Holiday Swap. But I’m starting to slow down a little bit in terms of the quick moving around and spending longer in places, because I can work remotely,” says Asquith.
