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HomeToGo: Scaling APAC hiring through Covid, entity-free
When HomeToGo accelerated its Asia-Pacific push in 2019, it needed to scale local headcount country-by-country without the cost and time drag of separate legal entities. RemotePeople’s EOR carried the hiring through Covid and beyond.
Sectors Travel · Vacation Rentals · Marketplace
Challenge Scale Asia-Pacific headcount country-by-country through the pandemic — without the cost and time drag of separate legal entities.
Location
Germany
Industry
Real Estate
Company size
350+
Founding Year
2014
With RemotePeople since
2019
We handle global payroll, compliance, and HR while you build your team.
HomeToGo, a vacation home rental service, was able to use RemotePeople’s Employer of Record to manage the complexity of the early pandemic days.
HomeToGo sets up travelers in vacation homes, cabins, beach houses, apartments, and condos all over the world. They also target the more intrepid among us: Houseboats, castles, farm stays, glamping, you name it — they’re the go-to platform for adventurous accommodation options.
HomeToGo’s pre-Covid APAC expansion plan
Founded in 2014 and partnered with dozens of international travel apps and websites, HomeToGo decided in 2019 to light a rocket under its Asia-Pacific expansion.
They sought a flexible international hiring solution. They needed to easily scale in each international location to reflect local demand, and the time-consuming and expensive prospect of setting up separate legal entities in every international location did not appeal.
This is where RemotePeople’s Employer of Record solution came in. An Employer of Record becomes the local employer of record for an international business in any country or region it wishes to operate in.
RemotePeople handled employment contracts, payroll, and employee taxes for HomeToGo in China, Japan, Australia, and South Korea, while the employees themselves managed HomeToGo’s day-to-day operations.
Our industry moves fast. We need to be ready to support our customers wherever they choose to go on vacation.
By using a global EOR solution, we were able to match our global staffing needs with rapidly evolving demand. RemotePeople enabled us to do this quickly — and cost-effectively — without the need to set up and close local entities.
Dr. Patrick Andrae Co-founder and CEO of HomeToGo
How Covid rewrote the global travel market in weeks
When the pandemic hit in early 2020, many companies in the travel industry were left scrambling.
Not HomeToGo.
EOR meant HomeToGo could be nimble — it could respond quickly to changes in demand due to lockdowns and travel restrictions. It wasn’t ‘locked in’ to any one overseas market.
With RemotePeople’s support, HomeToGo was able to restructure its Asia-Pacific operations with speed, reducing its presence in some places, while ramping up its operations in other countries as international travel resumed. HomeToGo was then able to hire staff in new locations — Thailand, France, Spain, and the Netherlands — without needing to worry about slow company set-up and bureaucratic processes.
Going from strength to strength, October 2021 saw the company managing a successful IPO on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.
Why EOR let HomeToGo scale up and down with demand
Summing up his experience, HomeToGo co-founder and CEO, Dr. Patrick Andrae, put it this way:
“Our industry moves fast. We need to be ready to support our customers wherever they choose to go on vacation.
By using a global EOR solution, we were able to match our global staffing needs with rapidly evolving demand. RemotePeople enabled us to do this quickly — and cost-effectively —without the need to set up and close local entities.”
About RemotePeople
RemotePeople helps businesses expand, recruit and hire in 150+ international locations. RemotePeople handles all employee payroll, benefits, and tax compliance on behalf of international enterprises, saving them up to 85 percent on the cost of international hires.
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