It was another late night spent coding, and Asher Hunt just wanted a place to crash. At 7 am, he finally made it to a friend’s place in San Francisco and found it overflowing with people: grabbing coffee, showering, ready to start the day. “I just wanted to get some sleep,” Hunt recalls. He jumped on the computer to find every AirBnB and hotel booked. “I knew I could ask a Facebook friend, but that’s always super awkward,” he says. And then it struck him: maybe it didn’t have to be.
And so he founded Overnight a year ago, capitalising on what he jokingly calls ‘the friend economy’. Mapping the world through home-stays, the platform draws on social media to find both its hosts and travellers. “You can choose to host only friends, friends of friends, or even people that you share common interests with,” he explains.
With over 5,000 hosts and growing, Hunt says millennials are even more selective than generations before them about where they choose to stay. “The trust factor is crucial, and using groups that people can relate to is a catalyst for building trust and enabling more travel.”
Overnight’s latest collaboration came about thanks to a chance meeting. Hunt’s girlfriend, Lindsay McCormick — also a frequent traveller — and a user of the Facebook group ‘Girls LOVE Travel’ (GLT) hosted a party for the members at her (and Hunt’s) home. Soon, 150 women showed up, including GLT founder Haley Woods. “I was the only guy there – I didn’t know what to do,” laughs Hunt. But he and Woods hit it off, ushering in a partnership for her GLT family.
Woods says, “When I founded GLT in 2015, I was working and travelling non-stop. I loved my independence, but was getting lonely.” She sought companionship in the form of her many Facebook communities, but she could only talk about “women, hair, or the Kardashians”, and her search for travelling companions would get lost in a sea of posts and comments.
Frustrated, she formed her own group. Two years later, GLT has exploded, bringing together 5,00,000 women. “It’s for women, by women, and there’s something so intimate and yet, so freeing about that,” she says. The concept of the now for-profit business is simple: empower active and aspiring female travellers among 100 location-based chapters worldwide. Overnight, then, was the answer to one of her most common user requests: “How can I travel affordably and connect with other GLT members?’
Overnight filled the void that Facebook couldn’t, using a 40-point security system check to match GLT hosts with its travellers. The two-month old ‘group within a group’ has 14,000 members already and lists over 1,300 homes globally, numbers that Woods says are continuing to grow each day.
Hunt hopes the partnership will give women the ideal travel experience, inducing more and more women into travel worldwide. “It all started out with building a trust network. And at the end of the day, that’s exactly what it boils down to.”
