WanderJaunt

» see wanderjaunt.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

There is almost nothing here to look at. I went to the Internet Archive for a homepage and got a two-kilobyte file holding a script tag and nothing else. There is no logo in it and no text. Every capture back to 2019 is the same hollow shell, because the site was a JavaScript application that assembled itself in the browser and the crawler only ever saved the envelope. So this company died twice. Once in June 2022, and once in the record, where it left behind less than a GeoCities page from 1998.

What it did was simple enough to describe. WanderJaunt signed leases on apartments and houses and furnished them, then rented them out by the night on Airbnb and the other booking platforms under its own brand, promising travelers a consistent product instead of whatever a particular host happened to own. The company called it hospitality at scale. The actual business was holding a lot of residential leases and betting that nightly revenue would beat the rent.

It started in 2016 in San Francisco with three co-founders, Michael Chen the most visible of them, and it grew the way that bet requires you to grow. Two million dollars of seed in August 2017. A fifteen million dollar Series B in September 2019, announced on the company blog under the title "Oh, the places we'll wander". By 2022 it was running units across eight markets: Phoenix, Austin, San Diego, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, Charlotte and Tampa. None of those are San Francisco, which tells you where the math worked.

~ the dossier ~

~ the money ~

The reported funding total depends on who you ask, and the disagreement is wide enough to mention. The trade press covering the closure put it at more than $25 million raised over three years. Other databases carry figures around $57 million. I cannot reconcile those from the public record, so the honest version is that WanderJaunt raised tens of millions of dollars and had around 85 employees when it stopped.

The leasing model is what made the ending abrupt. A company that merely connects guests to hosts can shrink quietly, because the inventory belongs to somebody else and simply stops being listed. A company that has signed the leases itself carries rent on every unit whether or not anybody is sleeping in it, and the 2022 travel market was recovering into rising rates and rising rents at the same time. When that arithmetic turns, it turns on all eight markets at once.

~ the voicemail ~

There was no farewell letter. No post, no email to the mailing list, no founder essay on Medium about lessons learned, which by 2022 had become almost obligatory. The notice was a greeting recorded on the customer service phone line, saying the company was ceasing operations due to current economic conditions and would not be operational after 30 June. Guests whose stays ended on or before that date could finish them. Anyone booked past it had to get out.

Property owners found out their tenant had folded, and guests found out their reservation had evaporated somewhere between booking it and arriving. A reporter at SFGate went looking a week later and wrote the piece under the headline that the company had vanished with barely a trace, and the phrase was literal reporting rather than color. The website was already gone by then.

~ what got buried with it ~

Today wanderjaunt.com still answers, in the narrow sense that a DNS record exists and a redirect fires. The apex sends you to the www host, and the www host returns nothing at all, so the domain is a hallway with no room at the end. It is a fitting last state for a company whose public face was always a shell waiting for a script to arrive. Somewhere in Phoenix and Dallas there are apartments that were briefly a brand, now back to being apartments.

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