When we started our Vacation Rental business in Rome in 1997 the Internet wasn't widespread. Competition was all about getting an exclusive agreement with owners and a wholesale deals with tour operators abroad. The contractual procedures for owners were tiresome and, most importantly, they had to give up control on their properties. This made the accommodation side of the market scarce and expensive. The supply side was even worse. Tour operators abroad were booming and busting, charging from 50 to 70% fees and bossing around with one liner faxes and emails.
The main sufferer was the final client, overcharged and with no control whatsoever on what she was going to get. We didn't start this business with ethics or environment in mind and we certainly aren't a model of perfection. We have a vision though of how our business can contribute its own tiny bit on taking an everyday path to sustainability.

We didn't like this, it was a lose-lose situation. It was the perfect example of a pre-internet market entrenched into the hands of a few greedy operators. In this field though, as in so many others, there was a loophole: the rest of us. We are all starving for transparency, fair fees, open access to the savings and the earnings of a peer to peer business. Internet is the key.

With a background in Political Science and Cinema Productions we weren't exactly the geeks we would have loved to be. Yet we saw the potential. With a website and barely no other competition online we could have killed the middlemen! Well, okay, they're not dead and it wasn't us who invented the Internet, yet that way of doing business in our field is over. Over a decade on, we are now a reputed piece of the vacation rental market and we practice transparency.

We're still based in the same garage we started from on via dei capocci, Rome. The original 1998 RomanReference website though, it has changed a great deal. We owe a lot to Sergio of Nerone (Rome guided tours). He was then running an e-zine then with useful information in Rome. We started collaborating and he tipped us the right direction.

We see the world by analogy rather than plan, ordered bottom-up rather than top-down. We don't want to select, choose or tip visitors to the 'right' direction, we don't want to tie anybodies hands with exclusive contracts. Search results are ranked on the basis of objective datas: time on page, bounce rate, conversion rate. In other words you are shaping our website with your very way of visiting it, we don't nudge you anywhere. Pictures, videos, unbiased user feedback as well as management replies. All amenities clearly published, drawbacks admitted. We want a network of open vacation rental portals where private owners and travellers can meet their needs. You shape it, you choose it and you book it. You know better!
We've gone a long way. Started from Rome, now we're building a whole citiesreference network which will shortly include also Paris, Copenhagen, Berlin, Barcelona and more to come.