VizEat is a rising star in the industry: By joining one of the most popular travel niches in the world, it has become one of the leading resources for local food immersion experiences.
Recently, VizEat acquired EatWith, which offers similar, engaging dining opportunities with locals, allowing VizEat to further increase its market share and offer more experiences in a wider range of locales.
"Both EatWith and VizEat share the same values: We're passionate about connecting travelers with local people around the dinner table, allowing travelers to discover the culture from the inside by meeting real people in their home setting," said Jean-Michel Petit, co-founder and CEO at VizEat .
"We're thrilled that this acquisition will enable VizEat to bring a greater variety of authentic local experiences to more people across the globe, alongside welcoming additional hosts from all over the world into our community."
VizEat is not stopping there. The company is looking to work with tour operators and travel agents to streamline its services, making dining with locals even easier.
TravelPulse checked in with Petit to get the scoop on the company's latest news.
TravelPulse: What destinations are the most popular with VizEat users?
Jean-Michel Petit: VizEat has more than 25,000 hosts across 130 countries. We're quite popular in Europe-particularly France, Spain, and Italy-but we're continuously expanding around the globe.
With EatWith, we're now having a strong host community, in the U.S. and, in the coming year, we'll strengthen our presence in Southeast Asia and Latin America.
TP: Will anything change with VizEat after this new acquisition?
JP: No, our mission stays the same: Change the way you travel; one food experience at a time. However, we are now able to provide our tourism and travel partners with even more exciting culinary experiences around the world.
TP: How does VizEat plan to expand within the travel and tourism industry?
JP: VizEat (and now EatWith) will make it easy for local, immersive experiences to be integrated into tourist packages and sold by tour operators and travel agents. Our food experiences with locals take only a few hours and are often one of the highlights of guests' trips.
The acquisition of EatWith allows us to work with a greatly curated community of U.S. hosts and expands our offerings to range from casual to high-end immersion.
We have close relationships with tourism boards, so together we're able to promote a more authentic and local view of tourist destinations. We are, for example, members of London & Partners, the Paris Tourist Board, and Atout France.
[READMORE]READ MORE: VizEat Finds Success Connecting Food and Strangers Abroad[/READMORE]
TP: How can travel agents work with VizEat?
JP: We provide to travel agents a private dashboard access allowing them to do an instant booking for their clients. For each destination/city, the travel agents have access to a selection of our best hosts, providing experiences like cooking classes, dinners, rooftop parties etc. Of course, there's a commission element associated with the bookings.
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