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Airbnb expanded their offering to hotels (including boutiques and bed and breakfasts). According to them, they're seeing strong growth in this segment[0], which
by the_watcher 8y ago
Airbnb expanded their offering to hotels (including boutiques and bed and breakfasts). According to them, they're seeing strong growth in this segment[0], which is probably related to your hypothesis: there's a group who aren't comfortable with the home-sharing model (or people who simply like hotels) and they're finding ways to serve those people.
The HotelTonight acquisition seems like it's a way to more rapidly scale their hotel inventory than anything else, although I suppose last-minute travel may simply be better served by hotels than home-sharing.
[0] https://press.airbnb.com/more-hotels-are-using-airbnb/ https://press.airbnb.com/more-hotels-are-using-airbnb/
- gav 8y agoI think it's a smart choice to give their customers the option for hotels, it solidifies Airbnb as a one-stop-shop for travel experiences. There's a lot of cases where a hotel makes sense, such as short trips (especially if it's just one night), or business travel (some companies have policies that exclude non-hotel stays from reimbursement for safety concerns), and so on. You don't want to send these customers elsewhere.
- vegannet 8y agoDoes this mean the next step is developers start building out brandless hotels that are a collection of individual investor owned rooms that are serviced and let through Airbnb. There’s already “invest in a hotel room” schemes (that are mostly fraudulent/garbage) so maybe this is an inevitability.
- randomacct3847 8y agoCheck out Sonder