How often are you asked by your friends for hotel recommendations? 

Too often, if you are frequent travellers like Trey Shores and Kei Shibata, which is why the two have teamed up to launch THE LIST, a collection of hand-picked hotels that they believe will suit the tastes of like-minded travellers.

THE LIST, launched this week, is Venture Republic’s first foray outside Japan where the company runs a successful meta-search flight and hotel business, travel.jp, and hotel.jp.

Said Shores, who heads up Asia Pacific development for a US-based lifestyle boutique hotel brand, “I travel extensively for my “day job” in hotel development and I have found that either there is just too much choice in the market or that the recommended hotels on curated sites tend to be only boutique or luxury hotels, which are in many cases not great value. 

“So I wanted to take it a step further and just focus on a hand-picked, very distilled offering, with no biases (ie for luxury, or designer or boutique). Singapore is a great example. The city has some quirky and interesting boutique hotels, but these are getting a bit tired and yet still demand high room rates. They no longer offer the value of, say, a new Westin or a well-priced Carlton City.”

Added Shibata, “It’s very much from my personal experience and Trey’s �" how often are we asked by friends and family, where should I stay? They know we travel a lot and they know we have some kind of criteria to select the hotel. We always answer their questions but it’s not easy, it’s always manual. So we said, why don’t we make it happen online.”

Read the full story here.