The Vienna-based company Guestia is acquiring the Munich-based home-sharing startup Airgreets from the Morton Group. With the merger, the company, which will operate under the Airgreets brand in the future, aims to become the market leader for home-sharing services in Europe.
The services of Airgreets will complement the portfolio of Guestia, which specializes in the global marketing of vacation rentals. While the Munich-based startup has previously handled many services in-house, in the future, locksmith, cleaning, and laundry services will increasingly be outsourced to external partners, in line with Guestia's business model.
Parallel to the merger, the company will also launch its market entry into Italy, where the tourist regions of South Tyrol and Lake Garda are scheduled to be developed in summer 2020. Destinations from the Baltic Sea to Croatia are planned for the next step.
High process efficiency and lean organization
"We see great growth potential in the home-sharing market. We rely on outsourced services and our own technology, which makes us independent of third-party systems and enables us to achieve high process efficiency and a lean organization,"
explained Martin Thor, COO of Airgreets.
The young company had previously focused on home-sharing services, i.e., the management of several hundred so-called primary residences in Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, and Vienna. In this context, Airgreets also referred to itself as an "Airbnb Concierge Service."
In December 2019, the company had to insolvency and was sold to the Morton Group in February 2020, followed by the acquisition by Guestia in June. The service in major cities will continue under the "Airgreets City" brand.
Potential for “cold second homes”
Previously, Guestia pursued a model of brokerage and all-in-one services for vacation home owners in Tyrol, Salzburg, Upper Austria, Carinthia, and Vienna. The future expansion of the new "Airgreets Home" line will focus on vacation destinations, as there is great potential for "cold second homes" in these areas, coupled with significantly fewer regulations and restrictions on the home-sharing economy than in cities.
“In the tourist regions, we often find open doors because our global marketing brings new target groups into empty apartments in the regions and thereby further boosts the ‘new’ tourism for millennials,”
so Michael Hufnagl, CEO of Airgreets.
