As the winner of the last Startup Weekend Beijing, Betty Tong, founder of Duanzumi was awarded a fast pass through to the Launchpad Competition. Duanzumi simply put is a Chinese-AirBNB, a website to list rooms for short-term rental.
Courtesy of Chris Tow
Although there are more prominent clones in China, namely Airizu, Duanzumi has been established since November 2010 and appears to already have some decent traction and a good amount of room inventory.
The short-term rental space is starting to get competitive with existing property portals such as Youtx.com from Soufan.com and Mayi.com from Ganji.com, a Chinese classifieds site. Of course, this occurred after AirBNB became one of the hottest start-ups from the Silicon Valley and has been valued at over US$1bn. However many of these sites have been criticized for simply taking existing property from their parent sites and simply listing them on a per night basis without the landlords knowledge.
Similar to Airbnb, Duanzumi charges a transaction fee to the room owner and it is only collected after the guest has arrived.
Duanzumi is also focused on holiday destination locations such as Sanya, Xiamen, Beijing, Xi’an and Qinhuangdao.
