onelocation started life in 2006 as an idea to build a holiday rental website that worked the way we worked.

You see every march (I know I know, we should have started looking earlier) we sat down to plan our summer holidays and every summer we'd hop on to sites boasting thousands of holiday properties from around the world. "Perfect" we thought, "we're sure to find exactly what we want right here". Wrong!

You see we knew where we wanted to go and we knew what we wanted. Southern Spain, not too crowded but not too quiet. No more than an hour from Malaga airport, child friendly with a swimming pool and dishwasher. (The dishwasher was No.1 on our list ... no way did we want to spend our holiday washing dishes!).

So we searched. Narrowed the thousands of properties down to a few hundred in a couple of clicks. We even managed to search for places with a dishwasher and a swimming pool. Now we had about 387 properties to choose from ... "that's great, such choice, we love this site". But not having been to that part of Spain before we had no idea what each location was like so for each property we had to look on a different site, check out the area and then go back to the first site and narrow our searches further. We spent hours, no, in fact we spent several nights narrowing down our choices. Finally we had our shortlist, we viewed each property and sheesh, what a disappointment. Sure the site had thousands of properties but we only needed one! Each listing was thin, a few pokey pictures and barely enough info to figure out where it was let alone decide that it might be the perfect location to put our family in for our, hard earned, two-week summer holiday.

Okay so why is onelocation so remarkable? Well, the fact is, onelocation is NOT remarkable at all? It doesn't boast thousands of properties from across the globe, it doesn't use any magic or tricks or state of the art technology to find the perfect holiday rental accommodation. In fact onelocation is as simple as simple can be. And that's why it works. Rather than boasting about the number of listings we have, we focus on the quality of each of those listings. With unlimited pictures, tons of info about the property, satellite maps, official tourism ratings, customer feedback and reviews plus loads of information about the area and lots lots more each listing gives you a complete picture of what it's like to stay in that property. And moreover the site is super simple to use ... we know because we've tested it on 7-year-olds and some of the most computer illiterate people we know!

Okay so enough about the site, what about the people behind it:

Steve Villiers - Founder and CEO
Steve has over 20 years experience as Creative Director and usability expert of his own online agency in London with a client list that included some of the world's biggest brands including betfair.com, Glaxo SmithKline, Channel 4, Disney and Volvo. He has an unnerving ability to make the complex seem simple and moved his family 6,000 miles to Cape Town in order to make onelocation a reality. (Ironically his family still don't see this as making the complex seem simple . When not running onelocation Steve can be seen chewing sand (is that the right phrase?) at Muizenberg beach where he's learning how to surf badly!


Alan Green - Co-founder
Alan was operations director with Steve in London and has the ability of being able to find a solution for anything. No problem is too large or too small and Alan will always find a brilliant, mouth wide open, how did he do that, solution. He's also the unofficial fastest web user in the Northern Hemisphere and when he's not 'plugged-in' to his online oxygen is a pretty darn good badminton player.


There is a whole bunch more of us behind the scenes and we'll be introducing them in the coming months. They are currently breathing life into the site and there's lots of DO NOT DISTURB signs around the place so we'll be asking them for their background info when it's safe to approach!