Aloha!

HiChee was founded in 2017 when a few tech friends and vacation rental property owners began talking about how the short-term rental market had changed and how several booking platform giants dominated the vacation rental marketplace, sometimes to the disadvantage of both guests and owners.

The cost of marketing listings changed from a fixed subscription pricing model to a pay-per-booking percentage model, borne mainly by the guest as "service fees." The combined fees between the guests and hosts added up to 15-20%. Thus, it became advantageous for the host to cross-list their rental properties on multiple sites since there were often no fixed charges.

Consequently, most vacation rentals are cross-posted on multiple websites at different prices. Most listings are on one or more Online Travel Agencies such as Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, and others. However, it's the same vacation rental with the same hosts when guests arrive!

As guests, we wanted to compare the prices and reviews across the different sites, but opening up numerous windows and tabs and managing going back and forth between the sites was a hassle. So we built a solution to make this easy - HiChee!

For a good explanation of how HiChee works, see this article How to compare vacation rental home prices by Kurt the Cyberguy.

For the hosts, we wanted to offer a free, low-effort, and low-risk marketing solution to boost their direct inquiries.

Today, HiChee.com has become a vacation rental price comparison site that allows you to search for savings for over 13 million listings across Airbnb, Booking.com, and Vrbo, plus alternative booking platforms and direct-to-host websites. Using our listing URL search feature, you can compare prices from owners and these major booking sites (aka Online Travel Agencies or OTAs) and get directly in touch with our growing community of "True Verified Hosts" and property managers.

HiChee is the flagship product of the ShakaCode software agency. You can read about how we built the product here on ShakaCode.com/hichee. HiChee is also based on React on Rails, the Ruby gem created by the founder Justin Gordon for integrating Ruby on Rails with React.

HiChee is hosted on Control Plane. We moved from Heroku to Control Plane and saved a boatload of money while getting better performance. Check out our tool and playbook for migrating from Heroku.

Big thanks to our React on Rails technology partners that support the operation of HiChee:

Would you like to join our team and thrive? See our open positions!