Is Arrivedo a Scam?

Arrivedo has been seen pretty frequently for about two years now on job listing boards that cater to freelance writers. Their pitch is that you can "work remotely for hotels around the world," choosing from free accomodation or cash in return for writing some sort of neighborhood guides for them.

To be fair to Arrivedo, they seem to be fairly up-front about this not being a standard writing gig and that there is a sales and speculative element to it. As a writer, I prefer a contractual agreement that spells out in advance exactly what work I'm expected to do and what I can expect to be compensated for it. However, I do think it's important to consider overall value and be open to other arrangements when they're a worthwhile risk.

So is that what Arrivedo is? It's very hard to tell. There is very little in the way of reviews or firsthand experiences posted about it online, even though it has been chugging along and advertising heavily for at least a couple of years now.

In today's post we'll see if we can figure it out.

What Does Arrivedo Do, Exactly?

First, let's try to get a better sense of exactly what Arrivedo's product is and what your role in creating it will be.

The product is basically a "neighborhood-guide-in-a-box" for hotels and motels. Arrivedo pitches this as a tool to level the playing field with AirBnB, which seems like a very questionable claim to me. Basically, they're creating the equivalent of the "neighborhood guide" that AirBnb emails to you after you book a place.

That's a nice little feature, and I suppose it may be popular with guests, but I have a hard time believing that it's a significant factor in someone's decision to go with AirBnb over a hotel. I'm a frequent traveler who stays at both hotels/motels and AirBnbs, so I'm exactly the target demographic they're trying to reach with this and I feel like I have some meaningful insight. Personally, I could care less about the neighborhood guide and I don't think I've looked at one even once. Why bother when there are so many other resources out there?

If I choose an Airbnb over a hotel or motel, it's because of one overriding reason - prices are lower across the board, so value tends to be better (at least in touristy areas where lots of people are hosting and there is plenty of competition). At the budget end, you can often get a decent room in someone's house with shared (or sometimes even private) bath for half what the budget motels are asking, and the environment will be much cleaner, safer and better than most budget motels. Airbnb also often lets you rent an entire unit for what a midscale hotel would go for, and gives you all sorts of unique rental opportunities from trailers to houseboats to an entire house.

So Arrivedo is selling a product that I don't argue doesn't have some sort of value to hotels and motels, especially in terms of helping them with local search positioning. But it doesn't address the core competitive advantage that AirBnb has, so I wonder if you're being expected to pitch these businesses a bill of goods.

Arrivedo's Work and Pay

Let's dive deeper into the sales component of the job, because that's the thing that I feel is most nebulous and questionable here.

Here's an example of one of their more recent job listings. Here's what they're asking:

1) Outreach to hotels: Approach hotels via email/calls or in person (what you prefer!) offering to set up their profile and create a guide in Arrivedo. (We provide support, resources, and incentives for contacting those hotels with Arrivedo team for upselling products)

2) 2nd: Gather hotels local recommendations: Interview hotel staff to collect the hotel’s local recommendations and insights into their neighborhood.

3) 3th: Create a Neighborhood Guide: Use Arrivedo’s editor to create 8-10 short articles showcasing the hotel’s local recommendations from themes ranging from routes, gastronomy, nightlife, cultural activities, essential tips and more.

The listed examples appear to be about 250-300 words each, so you're looking at probably 2000 words minimum of work on top of the sales commitment. You are also apparently required to source images for them, which is not an insignificant amount of work.

So let's step through all this. I'm going to assume they provide you with hotel leads. So we first have to cold-call the hotel, get ahold of a decision-maker and either pitch them on the spot or set up a time to pitch them. Then, according to the letter of the law, we're supposed to "interview hotel staff" (though I'll bet a lot of writers skip this step and go straight to Gooble, I'll include it since it's listed). Then the actual writing of at least 2000 words, plus pecking through royalty-free images and possibly formatting them.

I would put all that, conservatively, at at least a couple of full work days per hotel. Like 10 hours bare minimum and realistically probably more like 15. It might stretch on much longer if you hit a bunch of rejections, have to play phone tag with a hotel or field a barrage of questions from an owner. If they don't provide you with hotel leads, this whole deal just gets infinitely longer and more complicated.

So what's the compensation for all this? Well, from the Arrivedo FAQ:

"Typically hotels pay with 3 free nights of accommodation or $200"

Yeeeikes. I make $200 pre-tax for less than 2000 words of writing, never mind all the other stuff. And I'm not even anywhere near the ceiling of the industry. A realistic $100 max pre-tax per work day just ain't gonna cut it, especially with sales cold-calling that could end up being an unprofitable waste of time involved.

So Is Arrivedo A Scam?

From the worker end, I wouldn't class it as a "scam" per se, so long as they pay as agreed and in a timely manner. But it is definitely a bad deal.

Let's compare this to something similar that I'm more familiar with - the cost of setting up a blog for a small, local business. That's similar work and serves a similar purpose. A web design or SEO agency doing a little more than the amount of work you would be doing would be getting at least $1,000 at the lowest end, and this can go up by several thousand or so for a proven agency that can really deliver or is in a super-competitive market.

As mentioned earlier, you can do a lot better as even a moderately skilled writer with some business sense and ability to present yourself effectively. You could make that $200 with less writing work, let alone having to do all this speculative sales cold-calling, interviewing staff and photo sourcing.

If it's a true scam for anyone, I think it's at the hotelier's end. They're advertising this as some competitive advantage over AirBnb, but it really doesn't address the real reasons why AirBnb takes traveler dollars from them. If hotels really want to compete with AirBnb they'd be better off spending that money on steam-cleaning their dirty-ass carpets regularly, sealing up most of those needless conjoining doors and easing up with the shady "resort fees" to game the booking sites. In other words, it's your product and value, not your lack of mobile phone neighborhood guides that questionable amounts of people are even going to look at.

Another issue for hoteliers is that the terms and numbers tell you that these "guides" have to tend to be low-quality. They just have to. I can't imagine most of these writers are actually going to these places in person. If they're doing it remotely, it's very questionable as to whether they are a "neighborhood expert" or have even been to the neighborhood in question (or even the state, province or country). If SEO is a selling point, 250-300 words per piece is far too short to be useful for that purpose. Not only that, I skimmed through a number of these guides and the writing tends to be very basic ("Breakfast is important. Don't skip it! Here are five good breakfasts near London Holiday Inn") and sometimes sounds quite ESL-y.

All of this jibes with the very low compensation they are offering. I know from long experience in this industry that they cannot recruit and retain even solid mid-level talent at these rates, let alone really good travel writers who would deliver killer content. So their writer fleet is probably the usual gamut of hacks that suck around content mills and such for years and years because they can't do any better than these terms and rates. A reasonable expectation at these rates is that it's Perjeet who has never been to your country and never will, didn't talk to your staff and is just copying from Google.