Trip4Real is one of the peer to peer tour guide services that has appeared in the sharing economy in the past few years. Leveraging the experience and insight of locals, Trip4Real provides a platform for people to serve as tour guides and activity hosts for travelers. Founded in 2013, Trip4Real currently exists only in Spain but they recently raised $1 million in funding and have a partnership with AirBnb suggesting Trip4Real is positioned for much broader expansion. I spoke to Claudia Peyrí, the marketing manager of Trip4Real about their business model and plans for expansion.
ShareTraveler: You have an impressive number and diversity of activities offered on your site, how did you recruit so many hosts in just 2 years?
Claudia Peyrí: We have been working very hard in order to put high-quality content onto our website. We have tried several different things to acquire all the activities. Our quality department is also very active, checking and reviewing all the activities we post onto our website. There are also a lot of local people interested in being on our website just to share their passion. Normally they find out because of the word of mouth or through the media.
ST: How many experiences are offered on Trip4Real today?
Peyrí: We offer more than 3000 all around Spain and more than 1000 in Barcelona and surrounding areas. To give you an idea of our growth, the number of reservations has increased by approximately 70% compared to the last May.
ST: Do you have any plans to expand beyond Spain?
Peyrí: Our focus right now is to work hard in our main destinations in Spain in order to develop and maintain a strong presence in our home country. However, we definitely have plans to expand beyond Spain in the next few months. We’re still working on this and can’t announce anything official just yet.
ST: How do you distinguish your services from Vayable, a similar company that operates in many countries including Spain?
Peyrí: One big thing right now is that we are really focused in one country (Spain) where we have already established ourselves as leaders in peer-to-peer activities. We certainly have the highest quality and largest offering in Spain if we compare ourselves with other international competitors. Despite this, maintaining the essence of a p2p platform is very important to us, so we’re very focused on offering activities with real locals. Our quality department have very specific criteria when deciding which tours can be listed on our site.
ST: Many of your activities don’t yet have reviews, which help people to be confident that they are booking something good. Do you moderate people offering activities in any other way to make sure they are providing good services?
Peyrí: Most locals on our platform have a complete description of his/her profile and that helps a lot of travelers get to know more about their guides before actually booking an activity. But we also spend a lot of time making it easier for travelers by filtering through and approving each individual activity and sending our quality control department to try a lot of them out themselves. It’s very important that travelers can rely on us for high quality experiences. In fact, we haven’t had a bad review yet!
ST: How do you handle complaints from people who are not satisfied with their host?
Peyrí: Honestly, we haven’t really received any complaints. For us, our users (locals and clients) are very important and we try to make sure that every experience for them is great. We want to make sure our clients are happy at the end of their Trip4Real experience!
ST: I see that Airbnb is an influential force in your company, with an advisory role. Can you describe your partnership with Airbnb and how it has impacted the development of Trip4Real?
Peyrí: Our partnership with Airbnb is definitely very important. We both embrace similar business models where we connect locals with travelers, and they are trail-blazers in the industry. We were fortunate enough to meet with the company in San Francisco a few months ago, they have a great team and we really appreciate their support!
If you speak Spanish, here’s an ad campaign from Trip4Real featuring the famous Catalan chef Ferran Adrià: