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 rentals 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 "service fees." The combined fees between the guests and hosts added up to 15-20%. And it became advantageous to the host to start cross-listing 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 either VRBO or Airbnb or both. 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 it was a hassle to open up numerous windows and tabs, and manage going back and forth between the sites. So we built a solution to make this easy -- HiChee.

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

So today. HiChee.com has become a vacation rental comparison site that allows you to search for savings for over 12 million listings across Airbnb, Booking.com and Vrbo today, 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 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.

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