Tired and frustrated of staying in uninspiring and dull lodgings in their travels, Mr Federico Folcia and Ms Teo Jia En decided to set up Roomorama to provide more interesting accommodation options to fellow travellers, living on a tighter budget.

“We founded Roomorama out of our own needs,” said Mr Folcia, who is the Chief Executive Officer. “We had outgrown hostels and dormitories by then but we could not afford expensive hotels. We found the types of accommodation within our price range were all dull and cookie-cutter.”

The two New Yorkers also knew what it was like to be a landlord as well. “When travelling, we would also rent out our apartment via online classified to bring in some extra cash, but we never knew who we were dealing with and sometimes our guests do not show up. It was challenging and frustrating all round,” said Mr Folcia.

Therein lay the opportunity. Mr Folcia and Ms Teo set up Roomorama in 2009 to allow homeowners and property managers to list their properties on roomorama.com and travellers to book their accommodation through the website.

Roomorama aggregates an inventory of short-term accommodations worldwide from New York and London to Buenos Aires and Hawaii, providing travellers with a large variety of properties that they can book swiftly. Depending on the length of stay, they pay an 8 per cent to 12 per cent booking fee for the service, which includes all processing fees. The service is free, though, to homeowners and property managers.

The two founders’ philosophy is that renting a private home from or to a stranger should be an easy and safe process. “We wanted to make it easy for travellers to find and book apartments and homes around the world, simply and safely, and we wanted to provide a platform that made it easy for anyone who has extra space to rent it out, completely worry-free,” explained Mr Folcia.

The duo opted to set up an office in Singapore this year to focus on growth in Asia as they believed that there was huge growth potential in the short-term rental industry here. Worldwide, this business space is currently worth more than US$25 billion and growing rapidly, said Mr Folcia.

Another reason for setting up a presence in Singapore was the ease of doing business here. “We chose Singapore because the government makes it easy for companies to set-up and run their businesses. The whole process of setting up took us only one day.”

In the early stages, however, it was a challenge finding the right people to join their technology team. “As a start-up, we were competing with the big companies for our developers, and of course the larger companies have more resources to offer and greater prestige, so it was a challenge convincing people to join our team.”

However, Mr Folcia believes that the founders’ passion for the company and the freshness of the concept eventually helped Roomorama to attract a like-minded team.

The company also received help from the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA). “IDA gave us a lot of support and helped us connect with the start-ups and venture capital community. This added legitimacy to our concern, making it easier for us to attract and hire local talents and establish a greater presence in the region.”

Today, the company has more than 20 people working in the Singapore office, where its design and technology team is based.

Roomorama plans to aggregate the biggest inventory of short-term accommodations worldwide and provide travellers with the most variety of reliable and quality properties that they can book swiftly and safely. At the same time, it wants to provide homeowners and property managers with a seamless web and mobile application to manage availabilities and bookings, whether they work from the office or they are on the go.

“Our goal is to revolutionise the way people book apartments and homes when they travel, and make it as easy to book short-term accommodations around the world, as it is to book hotel rooms,” said Mr Folcia.