Trampolinn was a house swap service that offered an innovative take on travel lodging: basically couchsurfing meets home exchange. Home Exchange is not a super popular travel service (yet), and there are a lot of companies competing for members in this space, so it’s perhaps not surprising that another one of the mid-sized services is shutting down. Trampolinn sent around this email to members in mid-January:
Dear members, friends, partners, supporters of the Trampolinn adventure for the last 3 years,
It is with considerable emotion that the whole Trampolinn Team wishes you all the best for 2016 and announces that the service is shutting down in February. It has been more than 3 years since we started this entrepreneurial adventure, unfortunately there is not enough activity on the platform to gather the funding required to keep developping it. Today, we have to move on, particularly due to these financial worries. As you may know, building a service such as Trampolinn is expensive and requires a lot of energy and skills : wages, computer servers, communications and online marketing costs, texting and emailing fees, etc. Despite the growth of the community during the last year (35,000 members, 15,000 accommodations and 500 bookings), the number of booking is not enough to continue the adventure and our revenues are too scarce for the project to be profitable.
These 2 last years have been eventful. The team has traveled to many countries such as Spain, Germany and Thailand to meet the Trampolinn hosts while developing the travelers community. We have met great people, who became our Ambassadors, our investors, and even friends. For this, we thank you warmly.
Our modest success also led us to make enemies among our competitors. We had closed asignificant fundraising to further develop our community (€575,000) and thus provide you with more accommodations worldwide. Sadly, all our work has been undone by an opportunistic legal dispute with one of our competitors. I can only regret such behavior in a collaborative environment, which aims to build a better world.
We will keep you updated as the project progresses in the nearby future. A competitor may buy or integrateTrampolinn. You would thus be able to keep using the platform.
Happy new year,
Cheers,
Hugo ALLARY
CEO and founder of Trampolinn
I’m dismayed to learn about this legal dispute with a competitor. I’m under no illusion that home exchange is any different from other for-profit enterprises, with many players in this space fighting for members and in some cases using deceptive or underhanded practices to win market space. But with the market so small right now, it seems like it would be in the interests of everyone to see it grow with variations on the home exchange theme, hopefully bringing new folks in to house swapping. Trampolinn’s model targeted younger home swappers, a group that is not very well represented among home exchangers. Hopefully we will see their concept and hard work integrated into another site, as Hugo alludes at the end of his message.