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People have been renting out rooms, houses etc. for a very long time. When I was a kid you could call up the tourist board or various organisations for a list o

People have been renting out rooms, houses etc. for a very long time. When I was a kid you could call up the tourist board or various organisations for a list of people renting out rooms in their house. Other than a new delivery medium, exactly what has AirBnB added? The only thing I can think of is the feedback features.

Jommi 7y ago
Wow, you are really trying to reduce Airbnb's business arent you? How do you not see a global house/room rental platform not being a complete game changer on how people travel?
- newfeatureok 7y ago
  Their point is probably that Airbnb did not execute anything particularly well and its usefulness is because of scale, not in spite of it. The contrasting example would be Google, where even before it was popular was superior because of better execution (better search algorithms). Consider a hypothetical p2p car renting company (not Uber). With a few thousand users it probably wouldn’t be that useful as a service, but if 80% of the worlds population had their cars available on it the service would be incredibly useful, despite the core idea existing now already.
  - Jommi 7y ago
    Right, and I think what you're missing is that its not luck that allowed airbnb to scale, but exactly the combination of ingredients that it had when it started and during its growth. This is not a government monopoly situation. All those users chose to use Airbnb over other options for a reason. Let's not forget or diminish that.
prostoalex 7y ago
AirBnB monopolized the financials of the transaction. You could rent someone's vacation house through Craigslist and agree to pay cash/check, but if the place was not what it's cracked up to be, or the owner suddenly demands a higher rate (or slaps some fee that was not previously discussed), you were out of luck. AirBnB has its own share of scams with non-existent apartments, but their payout rules (as well as reliance on credit cards) provide some new consumer protection previously unavailable with p2p rentals. If your thesis is true, then any of those "tourist board or various organisations" can just put up a Web site, accept payments and start raking in millions of dollars. Besides Homeaway and Flipkey very few do.

Jommi 7y ago

Wow, you are really trying to reduce Airbnb's business arent you? How do you not see a global house/room rental platform not being a complete game changer on how people travel?

newfeatureok 7y ago
Their point is probably that Airbnb did not execute anything particularly well and its usefulness is because of scale, not in spite of it. The contrasting example would be Google, where even before it was popular was superior because of better execution (better search algorithms). Consider a hypothetical p2p car renting company (not Uber). With a few thousand users it probably wouldn’t be that useful as a service, but if 80% of the worlds population had their cars available on it the service would be incredibly useful, despite the core idea existing now already.
- Jommi 7y ago
  Right, and I think what you're missing is that its not luck that allowed airbnb to scale, but exactly the combination of ingredients that it had when it started and during its growth. This is not a government monopoly situation. All those users chose to use Airbnb over other options for a reason. Let's not forget or diminish that.

prostoalex 7y ago

AirBnB monopolized the financials of the transaction. You could rent someone's vacation house through Craigslist and agree to pay cash/check, but if the place was not what it's cracked up to be, or the owner suddenly demands a higher rate (or slaps some fee that was not previously discussed), you were out of luck. AirBnB has its own share of scams with non-existent apartments, but their payout rules (as well as reliance on credit cards) provide some new consumer protection previously unavailable with p2p rentals. If your thesis is true, then any of those "tourist board or various organisations" can just put up a Web site, accept payments and start raking in millions of dollars. Besides Homeaway and Flipkey very few do.