Europe

Sharing Economy for Travel Growth in Spain

I had a great time traveling in Spain last year, and found a strong network of sharing economy travel businesses around the country. I saved money by using these services, and also met a lot of interesting and kind locals. Here are some updates to my master spreadsheet of peer to peer travel businesses from Spain over the past few months.

spain mapI loved my guided tour of Penang using Withlocals, and now they’ve expanded services beyond their Southeast Asian focus to include Spain. Check out my interview with their communications manager.

Amovens, a Spanish ridesharing network which also offers a peer to peer rental platform, has added a car leasing and sub-rental option with the launch of FreeCar. With FreeCar people can lease an auto from Amovens for 6-12 months, and during this time they can turn around the rent the unused auto to others to recover some of the rental costs. Amovens sets the sub-rental prices by car size and also runs the system of sub-rentals, but the primary lease holder can decide when and to whom they wish to rent. This interesting system means Amovens can double up on profits for leased cars (they collect a commission on all rentals) while lease holders can recover some of the cost of car leasing through peer to peer rentals.

The Spanish rental lodging metasearch engine HundredRooms raised €1M last month. Stay tuned for my review of all the peer to peer rental lodging metasearch engines.