Dubai-based HiGuests raises $300,000 to manage your Airbnb apartment

HiGuests, a Dubai-based startup that helps property owners with sort-term rentals has raised $300,000 from different private angel investors in seed funding. This takes total investment secured by the startup to $700,000. They had previously raised $400,000 in two different rounds (also seed) in 2016 and 2017.

Founded by Miquel Manzanas & Oriol Plana in 2016, HiGuests manages short-term rental of properties on behalf of their owners through various portals including Airbnb, HomeAway, and Booking.com. The founders thought about the idea when they realized that the process of logistics around short-term property rentals has a lot of pain points. They started HiGuests with the aim to fix these pain points for the property owners.

The startup has two main offerings. First one is profile management, in which it create a profile for the property on these platforms and manages the booking requests, inbox and pricing of the property on behalf of the owner. The second one is full management of the property where they manage everything including the profiles, cleaning, post check-in assistance for guests, and home essentials. They charge 8% of the rental net income for profile management and 20% for the full profile management.

HiGuests has developed different mobile applications for hosts, guests and also have a property management system that allows the hosts to learn about performance of their property on daily basis.

The startup currently has their services available in Dubai, Mumbai, Barcelona, Adelaide and Dominica with local teams who manage check-ins/check-outs, cleaning, laundry, maintenance and 24/7 guest services.

“In just eighteen months, we have been able to take our services to five cities across four continents with more than 140 rooms being managed, and 6,500 guests hosted.” HiGuests’ Co-founder & CEO told MENAbytes. “Most of our investors are actually our customers who loved the idea and wanted to become part of it. Some of them have also become our advisors. We are very excited about the future with all of them on-board with us.”

They plan to invest the money on further expansion to at least four new destinations including Hong Kong, Peru, Bangkok and another city in India.  It will also be used to further develop their technology with an app for their operations team and a marketplace for their guests to book touristic activities.