Founded in 2013, Zilyo is a sophisticated metasearch engine for sharing economy lodging. There are a lot of peer to peer rental lodging websites, and users have to search across all of these sites to find the best option for their travels. Zilyo is solving this problem by aggregating lodging sites into one search engine. On Zilyo users can quickly pull up results from sites like AirBnb, HomeAway, Roomorama and more.
I’ve written previously about sharing economy rental lodging and the importance of these aggregator sites.
Although a relatively new company, Zilyo already claims to have the most peer to peer lodging listings of all the search engines on the web. I had the chance to talk with Hamed Al-Khabaz, the CEO of Zilyo, about his vision and plans for this new company.
ShareTraveler: Currently you have 23 non-hotel accommodation sites on Zilyo, do you have plans for adding in the sites you don’t yet have on board (i.e. VRBO, Wimdu, Housetrip, etc.)?
Hamed Al-Khabaz: Yup! We have a list of about 100 of non-hotel accommodation sites that we want to add up to our platform. A lot of them are big internationally, and others are regional specific (e.g: Tujia for China).
ST: How is Zilyo different from Tripping and Vakast, two other companies offering aggregator search capabilities for peer to peer lodging?
Hamed: The major difference lies in the product. We like to take it a step further than just aggregating results for the traveler. It is really important for us to offer a great browsing experience, from searching, to filtering, to viewing detailed information about the listing. A good example is that we let our users search based on venues or upcoming conferences. Once a search like that is detected, it will curate the closest spaces near the event for the user.
Hamed provided this example of the search.
Hamed: The first thing that pops into mind when talking about metasearch is the data. We currently host data from 23 different providers, and we plan to stay at that number a good while. The reason is that control gets more difficult as you add more providers because of unification (forget about extra maintenance). Even though quantity isn’t as high a priority as quality for us at the moment, we’re still the leader in terms of vacation rental properties offered. Our quality is also top notch because our information is the richest. For example, neither Tripping nor Vakast saves price information based on the date. Other information such as reviews, size, check in times, cancellation options, fees, etc., are not present in Tripping, but we offer them because we think these could be important for the user.
ST: You list Hostelworld search results, in addition to a 22 peer to peer rental sites. Why include this one traditional rental site?
Hamed: We’re really secular when it comes down to this. At the end of the day, the vision is to aggregate alternative accommodations to hotels.
Zilyo Search
ST: Zilyo is a relatively new company, how many users are you averaging per month?
Hamed: Most of our users are from the U.S. at the moment and west Europe. We’re currently averaging near 20k unique visitors a month at the moment, not bad for just organic visits.
ST: I first learned about Zilyo from a reference to your idea of offering not just lodging searches but a full range of sharing economy travel solutions in one phone app. It looks like this is something you used to offer on outpost.travel but it’s no longer available with the rebranding to Zilyo. Do you plan to roll out the search function for ridesharing and peer to peer activity guides to Zilyo?
Hamed: We dropped both rideshares and experiences for now because the engineering load was getting really heavy on our end. This let us focus more on what 98% of our users really liked about us.
ST: Do you have any plan to add ridesharing and other peer to peer travel services back in the future?
Hamed: It’s just like Kayak, they started with hotels only and then they moved into flights. You want to focus on the first category to be the best at it, and once you are the best at that category you need to maintain your number one position and then you can add other features like rideshares and experiences. If we ever get to add them back that means we’re actually killing it and it’s time to have them back.