Blueground and Placemakr CEOs on Emerging Trends: Full Video

25.08.2023 - 13:24 / skift.com / Rashaad Jorden / Jason Fudin / Alex Chatzieleftheriou

The evolution of blended leisure and business travel has been an enormous boon for businesses in all sectors of the travel industry, including short-term rentals. The rise in demand for short-term rentals can be attributed in the part to the surge in blended travelers.

Three travel executives — Blueground co-founder and CEO Alex Chatzieleftheriou; Placemakr co-founder and CEO Jason Fudin; and Travel + Leisure Co Senior Vice President of Global Rental Operations Heena Patel — addressed several issues regarding the sector at the recent Skift Short-Term Rental Summit in New York. They touched on a wide range of topics, including emerging trends in short-term rental demand, timeshares and the potential for extended-stay brands.

Watch the full video of the discussion with Skift Short-Term Rental Reporter Srividya Kalyanaraman and read the transcript below.

Srividya Kalyanaraman: All right. Thank you everyone for joining us. We have an eclectic panel today. So, Heena from Travel + Leisure, Alex from Blueground, and Jason from Placemakr. And I think it’s really symbolic of the competitions that’s heating up in extended stays, I would say. Let’s start with you, Alex. I know you had some news, you acquired Nestpick. You’ve typically been in Bluegrounds in 30-plus stays furnished rentals. So what was the reasoning behind, well, the partner network, but also specifically Nestpick?

Alex Chatzieleftheriou: Sure. So, Blueground is a global network of move-in ready homes for stays of a month or more, right?

Kalyanaraman: Right.

Chatzieleftheriou: That’s we’ve been building this for the past 10 years. We now operate with what we call our core model, about 15,000 apartments in 30 cities. The core model means that we work with landlords to either lease or have revenue sharing agreements or management agreements with them. We set up the units and then we lease them back to individuals or corporations. So, that’s been a great model for us, but we’ve seen a lot of demand coming up and we wanted to extend the options of supply. So, that’s where the Nestpick acquisition comes in. We acquired Nestpick with the intention of … Nestpick is a platform, again, for 30 days stays and has actually millions of listings from different operators around the world and with the team that’s been very experienced in that sector, will help us launch the partner network. So, partner network is effectively adding other operators in the space, high-quality vetted operators-

Kalyanaraman: Including Placemakr?

Chatzieleftheriou: Exactly. Jason and Placemakr is one of our first operators to be added in the network, and basically, we’ll list in addition to our core supply Jason’s and Placemakr’s supply, and we have lined up about 50,000 additional