Rated Apartments; Affordable and Comfortable Accommodation Alternatives for the Vacationer

Travelling on a tight budget means pinching many a pennies in the process. Travel, accommodation, food, connectivity is all important, but there is the restriction of price. Piling on friends is an option but that also means tying up plans with your host and limited privacy. But what if, you could combine the benefits of living in a home and enjoy privacy and comfort of a hotel? Sounds difficult, try rated apartments. After successfully executing peer-to-peer marketplace for accommodation seekers and providers in the UK and US, Sid Narang and team are looking to bring a similar concept in the form of Rated

Apartments to India.A 24-billion dollar opportunity

In our conversation with Narang, revealed that the holiday accommodation market worldwide is a whopping $24 billion. In the UK, Rated Apartments aims to account for GBP10 million of this market. Narang says since inception Rated Apartments has generated seven-figure revenue for its community of owners and are projecting to reach GBP 10 million worth of bookings within three years.

Rated Apartments has a network of accommodation providers that includes privately owned guest-houses, pent-houses and apartments. In an Indian market where investment in real estate has a large emphasis, Narang believes Rated Apartments will provide a new way to provide returns from these investments.

Pricing and benefits

From a customer’s point of view, Rated Apartment accommodations are affordable as they are significantly cheaper than the conventional alternatives. Take this 2-bedroom penthouse in HSR layout, Bangalore, which costs roughly Rs 5,500 per night. The same class of accommodation in a hotel in the same area will cost you, at least Rs 2000 more. This is consistent with all its offerings around the world.

Internet is almost a guarantee in all the apartments that it provides, which is an overhead cost at a hotel. Most of these apartments also come equipped with

a kitchen which further brings down expenditure on food.The online reservation platform is easy to use and informative. Along with reservations, the portal also provides information about places to see around the accommodation, calendar for availability and details about the accommodation itself.

Dealing with cheats

Managing individual landlords as a accommodation firm can be susceptible to fraud, wherein a landlord could declare availability of a non existent apartment. If this happens once, the system will flag those apartments and such cases would also be notified on Rated Apartments’ online blog.

However, it will be interesting to see how this works in India. Because on one end, this proposition will be very attractive for the cost sensitive Indian, while on the other hand it will be difficult to gain the Indian consumer’s trust. A considerable number of early adopters for Rated Apartments will help it establish as a trustworthy and better alternative.

Visit Rated Apartments for a sensible solution for your holiday’s accommodation woes