What are The Shortyz ?
The Shortyz are an annual awards ceremony organised by Short Term Rentalz, part of International Hospitality Media Limited. The Shortyz Awards celebrate the best in the short-term rental industry, and a wide range of businesses involved in the sector. This includes rental services, accommodation-booking platforms, interior designers, insurance companies, payment providers and many more.
How did the voting work?
The awards are decided through a 50/50 split. 50% of the vote lies with a panel of industry experts who review and shortlist the entries, while the remaining 50% of the vote is down to the public. This year was a record-breaker for the awards, with 400 entries across 18 categories, plus a whopping 69,000 verified votes from across the globe! Love Home Swap was nominated for the ‘Best holiday or home exchange platform’, and here’s the feedback we received:
“The judges were looking for evidence of growth and retention of members, effective marketing strategies, strong brand identity and successful staff engagement.”
Love Home Swap was declared as the category winner, at which point the judges declared:
“Our winner has promoted proactive initiatives to mitigate the impact of lockdown on membership levels and business performance during the pandemic. It retained 83% of customers despite the global travel ban and restrictions. The winner has a strong brand ethos and attracted significant numbers of new customers via free trials.”
What does this win mean for Love Home Swap?
Well, we now have proof that we’re the best home exchange platform – and we can proudly say that we’re award-winners! But more than that, we’ll continue our work to change the way the world travels through the power of home swapping. While travel was on hold for many of our members last year and at the beginning of this year, we focused on building and improving our site. We’ll be continuing this work through 2021, with an overall focus on helping more of our members get travelling again.
Just in case you’ve missed some of our recent highlights, here’s just some of the things we’re proud of:
Flexible membership options for new and existing members, to help them manage their membership whilst travel was temporarily paused.
A 'Swap Guarantee' for new members, offering them an additional year of free membership if they weren’t able to swap in their first year.
Flexible cancellations. We understand that planning ahead can be difficult right now. So if our members aren’t able to enjoy their planned home swap due to Covid-19-related issues, they can reschedule their swap to a later date, free of charge. If a member is swapping using Points, they’ll receive their full Points amount back too.
An innovative NHS homes initiative. This was in partnership with STAA and allowed UK members who owned second homes to offer their place to a key worker in need of accommodation during the height of the pandemic. Not only did this provide an essential service during a time of crisis, it also united our community as we continued to share our homes and spread the love.
This has meant that our community has thrived during the pandemic, with new members continuing to join us and a very strong renewal rate, even during the depths of the lockdown. This gives us reassurance that our members are determined to start home swapping again as soon as possible – and we can’t wait to facilitate these adventures!
A big thank you
We want to say a massive thank you to our dynamic Swapstar team, as without them, we wouldn’t have been able to deliver the amazing things we’ve achieved over the last 12 months. We’d also like to thank our incredible, resilient community of travel-loving home swappers. Against the odds, they have stayed positive and enjoyed home swaps whenever and wherever possible over the last year. We also want to say a huge congratulations to the other winners of the Shortyz who won in an additional 17 categories - and well done to everyone that was nominated and short-listed for the awards. You’re all winners in our eyes.
If you’d like to watch the event, you watch it here.
