Staywimi is a social marketplace: a blend of Facebook and eBay, but for space. It's a marketplace where people can either list their extra space for rent, or book someone else's space.
What we do has a number of names, like homestay, short-let, pad-crashing, couch surfing. What do we call it?
The friendly way to stay!The site is open for custom. You will see an increase level of functionality and engagement on the site as we open it up for use.
We love this part of our name. It is an abbreviation of 'With Me' mixed with 'wiki'. It symbolizes peoples' ability to connect through the internet to help each other achieve more than they could alone in the real world. In the case of Staywimi, people with extra space can earn money and help those who need accommodation to save money. Meanwhile everyone enjoys the friendly and secure process. Some have called our type of business Collaborative Consumerism. We call it gorgeous.
Staywimi is open to anyone over the age of 18. Hosts should have permission to take in lodgers from the property owner / landlord.
Well that depends on whether you have space or need space. If you have extra space, you can earn extra cash effortlessly by having someone to stay the night once a week, 4 times a week, or during weekdays. Vary it on whatever suits your diary.
If you need a place to stay, Staywimi will help you find comfortable and convenient rooms with friendly Hosts, giving you an alternative to mundane and lonely budget hotels.
All users sign up and create a profile by entering an email address or by connecting with Facebook. It's that simple. You will get the option to become a Host (to list your accommodation) or a Guest (to book a trip).
See how do I list my accommodation and how do I book a trip?
Guests simply find a space they like and request a booking with the Host. The Host decides if the Guest may stay and accepts or declines their request. When a Host accepts a request, the Guest confirms the booking. Guests may request multiple bookings simultaneously.
It's easy, when you're happy you've taken a good look around the site, press the 'Sign Up' button and follow a few simple steps! It should take you about two minutes or so. If you're ready to sign up, click here.
Quick registration helps users more than halve the time it takes to sign up and complete a Staywimi profile. It works by importing some information from your Facebook profile, including your name, profile picture, gender and DOB. This information updates automatically as long as the two are linked.
Connecting with your Facebook profile helps other people see you're a real person with real friends and helps them learn a bit about you and what you're like.
In short, other users will only see what they might see if they searched for you manually on Facebook. Facebook let's you control who can see your information, please seek further guidance from Facebook on your privacy settings.
Yes it is very simple to do this. Go to your profile and press the Disconnect from Facebook button. You can reconnect it at any point in the same place.
To get a Facebook profile and register with Staywimi, click here, this will redirect you to Facebook. After signing up to Facebook, you will be asked if you want to allow Staywimi to access your information to complete your profile.
Three reasons; security, comfort and respect.
In order to provide a secure service for our users, we must give everyone the ability to dictate who they will have personal contact with. Understandably, for Hosts this means limiting who may enter their home.
As well as being your means to log into Staywimi.com, we use your email address to send you vital service information, such as booking requests (hosts) or booking confirmation (guests). If you miss out on the emails, you miss out on the service.
Staywimi will never pass your email address onto third parties, read more about our Privacy Policy here.
For the comfort of all Staywimi users, it is very important that our service is totally transparent to allow users to dictate who they have contact with when using the service. For this reason we ask our members to supply a recent photo of themselves before they book/receive bookings.
All users need a personal profile for the reasons stated above. Hosts need to supply additional information on top of this so that Guests can find out about the accommodation before requesting a booking.
Your name, photo and 'about' information is visible. Your contact and address details are retained until bookings are complete.
A service like Staywimi relies on the social interaction of its members to build trust, and provide a friendly and secure service. Consequently, we ask all members to tell others a bit about themselves.
If you like what we're doing, why not get your family and friends in on the action too so they can benefit from Staywimi. If you know people living near major venues such as The O2 Arena, Wembley or the Olympic Park, Stratford, they might love to hear they can rent their extra space with Staywimi.
Simple, you can use the search bar at the top of every page to search for a location, venue or event. In the default search results, you will see a brown button saying "Stay near here" - this appears next to venue and event results. When you click on this, you will see a list of rooms with distances to that venue or event.
You can sort rooms according to their distance from the location or venue you are going to, as well as by cheapest price first. These options are shown above and to the right of the list of search results. You can also choose to view results on a large map view.
Staywimi uses a three step booking process:
The Guest finds a room, checks its calendar and enters dates of their trip and if appropriate an offer.
The Host receives the request, reviews the Guest's profile, the dates of their booking, and their offer if they made one. If this is all OK, they 'Accept' the request.
When the Host accepts a booking, the Guest gets the option to Confirm and Book the stay. At this point, the Guest makes an online deposit with a credit card and the booking is completed. The Guest will either pay the Host the remaining balance in cash when they arrive, or by card at a date set by the Host before the stay.
The Booking Request feature is designed to allow Hosts to decide who may book a room in their home. As our accommodation is in peoples' private homes, we think it is right that the Host decides on who may stay, for this reason, at this moment Guests may not book a Host's room without the Host first accepting a booking request.
This approach also gives Hosts a chance to double check the availability of the room before accepting a booking.
On the Property Profile page, you will see a list of available rooms. Each room has an individual calendar, you click on the date of the first night of your stay and press the "Request Booking" button. This takes you to the next stage, where you select the number of nights and number of Guests for the stay. In addition, some Hosts allow Guests to make an offer, if this is the case - you will see a box below the date fields where you can enter an "offer" amount.
You can see this information in the first tab in the 'My Bookings' section of 'I am a host', which shows you a list of all the requests you have made.
You may make an unlimited number of requests.
You confirm a booking by going into a booking request and pressing the Book button. Follow the three steps, and it's done.
No.
Guests can pay by using their credit or debit card through our secure payment system.
You pay a deposit when you book the room and the remaining balance must be paid one week before your stay begins.
By leaving feedback and a rating, you help other Staywimi users to learn more about that Host and their accommodation.
Yes.
The same way we want the Guest community to access honest reflections on a Host's accommodation, we feel it is fair that the same insight is given to Hosts, who open their homes to Guests they may not have met before.
We love all types of accommodation and are thinking up and adding new options to the system. There are a lot of Guests out there, each with different budgets and preferences, so we would love to give you, and them options galore!
Yes, yes, yes. We are focusing strongly on providing rooms during the Olympics at the moment, so we'd really like to partner with homeowners in East as well as Central London. If you have accommodation near the O2 Arena, Wembley Stadium, ExCel centre or other major venues / attractions in London, your accommodation may be especially attractive to Guests.
But. Don't worry our attention isn't limited solely to London, people everywhere can become Hosts.
Yes. There is a lot of demand for people to find good accommodation during the Olympic period, and a good chance for locals to offer their houses as accommodation. For those lucky enough to have got tickets, Staywimi is the perfect opportunity to find a more homely environment to stay. Whatsmore the sooner you sign up and get good reviews, the better your profile will look for those booking for the 2012 Olympics!
It can be. Private homeowners can earn £4,250 tax-free in the UK under the rent-a-room government scheme. Learn more here.
It depends on your unique situation. Please seek specialist advice from your insurance provider/broker regarding insurances to cover you for having short-term lodgers.
It depends on where you live, what you're offering, and how frequently you have Guests to stay. Here are a couple of scenarios with some hypothetical earnings.
Scenario 1: An en suite double room in a private home costing £45/night. If rented two nights per week would generate a minimum of £3,978, tax-free!
Scenario 2: A single room in private home costing £30/night. If rented for weekdays for 40 weeks a year, would generate over £5,000.
Put it like this; if you rented multiple spaces out simultaneously, and increased your prices at peak times, you could earn a lot.
Please see Who sets the price of a room?
Yes you can change this easily. Please see Can I change the price of a room around peak times?
Currently, a user may list one property on Staywimi.
This means you can write a general description of the property and surrounding area such as venues once, and detail each space they rent separately, minimizing the work required from you. Also, each space has its own calendar so you can offer a range of spaces and take bookings individually.
Also, Hosts can vary which of their spaces is available individually. For example, they might rent their spare room during weekdays and add a sofa bed at weekends. This is only possible by having separate room profiles.
Currently you can list up to 10 rooms within your property profile.
You decide the price of each of your spaces. We suggest you research other accommodation available in your area. The price of your room should take into consideration three factors; (1) the quality of accommodation you offer, (2) alternative accommodation offered in the area and (3) the cost of alternative accommodation. Try a price and see how much interest you get.
Yes. Prices may be changed for individual or multiple days. Depending where you live, peak times could mean Weekends, Weekdays or holiday periods - we have given Hosts features to deal with all of these. Follow the path below to get to the right place.
To make changes to your prices and calendars, please click here
Staywimi doesn't dictate the maximum price of a Host's room. As long as a Guest is prepared to pay it, you can charge a sum of your choice. We have given hosts access to the 'offers' feature, learn more about this below.
This feature gives Hosts an option to allow Guests to make an offer other than the 'list' price. This may be particularly helpful as Hosts get started with Staywimi, to help them decide what their prices might be, as well as around peak times if the room is in demand by multiple Guests.
There are three steps to booking with Staywimi.
When you accept, the request changes to a provisional booking. The Guest can then confirm or cancel the provisional booking.
Send them a little message to confirm arrival details and times. They may need directions to your home. If you requested payment by PayPal, you can now give them details to allow them to pay you.
To get a PayPal account click here.
This measures how efficient you are at dealing with Host-related actions to help set a Guest's expectations when they browse your listing and consider booking. Don't worry, we also measure Guests' response times! If a Guest is booking a room urgent travel, the Host's ART will be a key factor in their decision making.
This helps both parties to confirm the finer details of a stay throughout the booking process and after confirmation. These details might include the time of arrival and departure,
Nothing. We think you'll benefit from our service, so we trust you to be fair to us. We want to get you as much business as possible, and maintain our users' security.
We advise our users not to make contact with each other until a booking has been confirmed, when we put users in touch with each other. If a Host is found to have elicited business from the Staywimi platform and avoided the booking process, their Staywimi account will be frozen until the matter is investigated fully by the Staywimi team.
Yes there are. Be a lovely person, give a warm and friendly welcome to your Guests, go the extra mile for them and make their trip a special, memorable one.
We wouldn't have built the website if we didn't think it was safe. As with all web-based services, we advise our users to exercise common sense, and to never deal with someone they do not want to deal with. Hosts are under no obligation to accept booking requests.
Extras are little things you can offer Guests that might make their stay that bit better. Extras could include any of the following:
TV, Ensuite, Internet / WIFI, Breakfast, Pets allowed, Towels, Gym, Parking
It is up to you. You can select to provide a full breakfast, normal breakfast or no breakfast.
Please advise Guests if you provide towels within the room description. If you forget to write this in here, you could send Guests a message even once the booking is confirmed to say whether they need to bring a towel.
Hosts pay 3% to cover the credit/ debit card charges and then 12% commission. This is deducted from the rental income. Therefore no income no fee. It is free to register your property.
Hosts can withdraw their money into a PayPal account. To get a PayPal account, click here.
We ask Hosts to provide Guests with a rating and some feedback after each stay to help others know about that Guest. Often, other Hosts have done it, so why not pay it forward?
It's your choice. It might be that you want to exchange a couple of messages with that Guest before you accept their booking request, that's fine. Don't make them wait too long if you don't plan on accepting their request.
We can't force you to leave them feedback, but please consider others and make the effort. The feedback system is set up to auto-message users that have forgotten to leave feedback.
