The Plum Guide has raised £14m from early-stage investors to support its ambitious rollout to 12 new cities this year.
Known as the “Michelin Guide for Homes”, The Plum Guide booking platform uses a proprietary algorithm to find the highest rated and best located homes in a city. Expert hospitality critics from The Plum Guide then visit each home to interview the host and check the property. Ultimately, only 1 out of every 100 properties in each city is invited to join the collection.
It was founded to solve the problem of inconsistent quality, encountered by anyone booking a vacation rental online. Most open marketplaces rely on peer-to-peer review systems to judge quality, but standards vary hugely in reality. The Plum Guide aims to guarantee consistent quality every time.
By the end of 2019 it expects to offer almost 12,000 verified homes in the most sought-after cities for holiday rentals, with 100 new hires being made to support its growth ambitions.
The latest funding round is led by Talis Capital, with participation from Latitude and Hearst Ventures, as well as Octopus Ventures – who led the Series A funding round.
Since launching in London in 2015, The Plum Guide has achieved year-on-year growth of three times revenues, for three years’ running. In 2018, it added homes in five new cities to the platform and saw repeat bookings jump 27% after it opened in Paris, its second location after London.
The key to its success has been customer referrals, which drive a quarter of all bookings. “We are on a mission to build a marketplace of the world’s most beautiful holiday homes. We are taking a systematic and obsessive approach to vetting every single home on the planet and accepting only the top 1%,” Doron Meyassed, founder and CEO of The Plum Guide, said.