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I don't get Airbnb's business. By now, it's a mature company. But if you compare it's business with Booking, you'll see that Booking is much cheaper not only a

I don't get Airbnb's business. By now, it's a mature company. But if you compare it's business with Booking, you'll see that Booking is much cheaper not only as a guest, but also as an investor, having wider revenues + net income as well. It's long gone the times since Airbnb was cheaper than a hotel, I remember back in the days, it would be roughly 50% cheaper. Nowadays, it's about the same price as a hotel. For some occasions, like when you want to rent a home for 4 or more, it might make sense, but I fail to see how it's going to stay competitive in the long run. Maybe now they are targeting a different customer than me, that likes to travel on a budget. As a consumer, I like the booking has competition and hotel prices have come down since the Airbnb explosive growth. Booking also sell flights (on priceline) and is a much wider business, not to forget, that lots of hosts sell on both platforms. To me, Airbnb looks like a doomed business. Sure, right now it's margins are okay, they've got a good brand, but that's pretty much all they've got. I don't get why don't they explore other markets, or the "air" part in the name.

CalRobert 3y ago
I travel with my kids, and usually can find better places for a whole family on airbnb than I can on booking.com.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  Usually the same places are listed on both.
  - prepend 3y ago
    I find the room configurations on booking.com are harder for families. Bnbs usually have more configurable space so it’s good to know sleeping surfaces and whatnot. Booking.com has typical listings if I want to search for single rooms or number of beds. But they aren’t “trustworthy” for what actually sleeps 3,4, or 5 people.
- tacker2000 3y ago
  For big groups or families with kids it might make more sense, since the places are generally larger than a standard double hotel room. But for the classic solo traveler or couple, a hotel is the better option nowadays. Dont really know how the ratios here are but i would guess solo/couple is about 70% of travels?
  - raziel2p 3y ago
    Even as a couple, we prefer to pay extra to have a kitchen and a living room to just hang out in. If we literally just need a place to sleep a hotel is fine, but we enjoy actually living in the place we're visiting. That being said, the premium you have to pay on this now has become so high that we often reconsider.
    - xnorswap 3y ago
      Perhaps my experience is biased toward higher end hotels, but I find a good hotel far far more relaxing than an apartment. Hotel have bars, lounges, lobbies and sometimes terraces. Where everything is catered for you and staff are there to attend to your needs. If you have any issues or questions about the local area, a receptionist or concierge can help and advise. Compared to my (admittedly limited) experience with AirBNB where getting any information from the "hosts" felt hostile, and the arrival experience alone often mired by instructions to effectively sneak into your place of stay because it's not supposed to be for holiday lets. That can't compare to walking into a hotel and having your bags taken off you by a porter while simultaneously being handed a drink (if desired).
      - amerkhalid 3y ago
        I never understood the appeal of AirBnB. All these points about having a kitchen or living room to hangout sounded negative to me. But someone finally explained. It is vacation vs travel. I’m a vacationer, I don’t want to deal with parking, cooking food, cleaning the place. On vacations, I just want to relax and probably spend as much time out doing things as possible. When tired and not sleepy, I rather hangout in hotel lobby or by pool. Travelers want to experience new places like locals. So AirBnB appeals to them because they can do grocery shopping in local stores, experience different parts of city that normal tourists don’t.
- hef19898 3y ago
  In the last years, our experience is pretty much the oposite, in Europe that is.
  - CalRobert 3y ago
    Funny enough I really only use Airbnb in Europe (we live in Europe). I've heard nightmares of people being expected to practically do home renovations before checking out in the US but haven't come across that here. Maybe I've just been lucky.
otteromkram 3y ago
Airbnb's business is to enrich the pockets of homeowners/landlords and place travelers in potentially dangerous situations with little in the way of recourse or resolution. If you hate your family, friends, and coworkers, feel free to recommend that they use the service.
- pipes 3y ago
  Well I find it really useful for taking my family on holiday. Hotels are not good places to bring very young kids and the prices are way out of our range. Of course it's designed to make money for hosts. I live in Edinburgh and over the last ten years I've witnessed a change that isn't something I want. The old town is more or less a filthy theme park where few residents can or would want to live. Lots of my co workers used to live there. It's a shame. I have friends who've got a lot of noise issues with an Airbnb opposite their tennement / block. Hopefully some sensible planning laws can be brought in that don't kill Airbnb in the city but limit it some how. Edit and I wish Airbnb would include all fees in the advertised price
  - dkqmduems 3y ago
    Airbnb is good for travel but not where you live?
    - HWR_14 3y ago
      It's bad for residents but good for travelers is a perfectly coherent statement.
      - true_religion 3y ago
        Right. I lived across the street from a hotel in DC. People were always drunk and rowdy, or having proms. The area was fantastic for nightlife and dining though... which I think is something AirBNBs sometimes lack. They bring all the downsides of a hotel to residents, but they're not in a light commercial zone so the residents don't have any of the upsides of hotel district either.
keiferski 3y ago
This sort of comment always appears on Airbnb threads and it makes me scratch my head. Airbnb is not the same price as a hotel in the overwhelming majority of places in Europe. Especially if you are an individual and just want to rent a room (not an entire apartment.) And even then, the apartments are absolutely cheaper. I can’t imagine this is limited to Europe, either. I’m not familiar with the new NYC law, but assuming it doesn’t affect bedrooms, only full apartments: it’s absolutely cheaper than a hotel. Good luck finding a hotel for less than $100 a night anywhere in the five boroughs.
- ceph_ 3y ago
  I don't fully agree all of the top commenters points, but I do on their price one. Airbnbs used to be significantly cheaper than hotels and now, in many metros throughout the world, they're comparable. It's just down to tradeoffs on what you're looking for. You can get a kitchen and a bit more space with an airbnb, but you give up on the hotel amenities of support/cleaning staff, and lounge/gym spaces. Don't get me wrong, I usually value a full kitchen over maid service. But I was able to stay at nobu for a comparable price to a 2 bedroom in Barcelona. I do agree with your point about renting a room in someones place. But that's now a small fraction of airbnb's business compared to renting a full place.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    I have used AirBnbs nearly a hundred times and they are never comparably priced to hotels. But this seems to be an anti-Airbnb hate fest, not a rational discussion, so obviously data isn't relevant here.
    - travisporter 3y ago
      Or, consider that Airbnb is different in different countries and experience varies accordingly.
      - keiferski 3y ago
        I guess? I've used it in over a dozen countries in Europe, probably ±20 cities in the US, Morocco, Japan, Turkey, and more that I can't remember. I've never had any issues, beyond a few things with the space itself (e.g., the street was really noisy when the windows were left open.) Maybe a few could have been cleaner, but again, nothing that was nightmarish. In my experience, hosts have been about half very cool and friendly and half professional, but minimal. My guess is that the people with extremely negative experiences either didn't look at reviews before booking and/or are the type that trash hotel rooms and have issues with spending 2 minutes cleaning up after themselves. Ask anyone that's worked in hospitality: that type of person is sadly very common.
danpalmer 3y ago
> they've got a good brand, but that's pretty much all they've got. I wouldn't underestimate this. I recently went on holiday, and while I ended up booking on Booking.com as I have done for all my recent trips, I still described the place I stayed in as an AirBnB when asked by friends where I was staying. That will last a long time and is arguably the "hard bit", turning that into revenue won't take much. I was even doing most of my browsing on AirBnB. I think AirBnB have just missed the budget end a bit. If you want to stay in a nice place there are some amazing places, and with their Super Host program the mid to high end is well catered for. What has been lost is the budget end where so much of the market is, and which Booking.com is excellent at. I'm a fairly budget conscious traveller and find AirBnB to be average to poor value for money now. A new budget conscious program where you still know you aren't going to get placed in a glorified hostel would be great.
- thiago_fm 3y ago
  I wouldn't underestimate it, but comparing the balance sheet of Booking.com and airbnb you see that booking is crushing it and Airbnb in an overvalued company (with meh growth. Last quarter for example, Airbnb had timid growth, meanwhile Booking did much better. For the current size Airbnb is (not as big as Booking.com), and market valuation, I'd have much higher expectations for it.
user3939382 3y ago
Booking.com yet another company I’ll never trust with dark patterns in their UI that hides fees.
- corbezzoli 3y ago
  Dark patterns aplenty, but hidden fees? I don’t think there's a single hotel booking site that shows taxes by default unless required by law. Maybe Google Search? I use Booking.com plenty and it's pretty predictable. Agoda on the other hand has super… ahem "flexible" prices that change at every reload, or depending on how you reach the site, or on your cookies, or…
  - prepend 3y ago
    > single hotel booking site that shows taxes by default unless required by law That doesn’t make it not suck. Not hiding fees doesn’t mean “we always show what’s legally required.” As a customer I want to know how much things cost. It’s a pain to not know taxes when shopping rooms. Especially since I rarely know city taxes and some hotels have different taxes because they are “resort” or “convention” or whatever tax rules exist for a particular jurisdiction.
    - corbezzoli 3y ago
      Totally agree, I'm just saying it's unfortunately a standard across the industry, it's not just Booking. You're always allowed to set "show full price", which is then remembered after the first visit. It's the first thing I do whenever I compare prices across sites. Overall I find Booking pretty neat, once you get past all the "449 people booked this room in the last 4 seconds" bs. Having said that, Agoda has the lowest price most of the time, so I put with their bs even more willingly.
      - user3939382 3y ago
        It’s a standard in the US because of lacking consumer protection laws. Some countries don’t allow these companies to play these games and the advertised rates are the real rates.
pjmlp 3y ago
I am an heavy user of both, and have had plenty of good experiences and much cheaper locations in Airbnb than Booking, specially from those hosts that sell in both platforms.
grotorea 3y ago
Naively speaking, but if it's the same price as an hotel, that just means there's enough demand for AirBnBs to push prices up to equality, no? Isn't that good for AirBnB? Sure it probably means it doesn't make sense for say, busy business travellers, but there's people who want AirBnBs.
creer 3y ago
Airbnb started a large arbitrage process. Kinda the same one booking.com and the others are in. It's the nature of the game of arbitrage that it changes. That is its fundamental characteristic. Arbitrage is not static. Airbnb helped owners (and renters) realize they had an under-expoited asset. And travellers realize that hotels were over-priced and feature-poor. And consumers that booking services (travel agents) were often lax and complacent and sometimes true gems. Etc We are now in the phase where some Airbnbs really are overpriced as seen from the consumer side. But perhaps perfectly priced as seen by the owner (who perhaps wants fewer but higher priced rental days to better fit their own hassle overhead.) There is space for the prices to bounce around. And for some consumers they are still what they want: as others described, if you want more than a couple days and you want a real living place as opposed to just a place to sleep and desk. Does it mean that AirBnB disappears? Of course not. But their business has really changed, yes. Have they adapted enough? Are they continuing to adapt enough? What sounds more of a problem to me is that Airbnb has not solved its hassle issue: The inventices for the reviews to be effective don't seem right to me. And it has not solved its issue of relations with governments / voters: the supply of Airbnb is threatened pretty much everywhere. And while booking.com and the others seem highly diversified, perhaps not so for Airbnb.
- thiago_fm 3y ago
  That's true, it enabled people to explore that sector on their own, that typically meant a big investment (hotels/real state is expensive AF) Now it's basically: have a property and enjoy doing the backoffice of short term rentals (cleaning/basic accounting/being a host), and then you are essentially competing for customers that would typically go to a hotel/hostel. But if you think about it rationally, Hotels, even very cheap ones should be able to offer more services for less, given that a hotel cleaner can go room after room doing the work. The same is for other utilities like swimming pool etc, as it's shared, it's cheaper. There used to be a time when hotels were more expensive even though you could get an apartment for yourself with a pool and all those services, as well cleaning fees were lower. Nowadays after the arbitrage happened, things are more evened out. Anyways, I understand that for people with money or certain conditions, Airbnb is more interesting, but I can't see that model having a scale bigger than the old way, it's just a niche, and I think Airbnb at the moment fail to make that niche as profitable as the main thing.

CalRobert 3y ago

I travel with my kids, and usually can find better places for a whole family on airbnb than I can on booking.com.

prmoustache 3y ago
Usually the same places are listed on both.
- prepend 3y ago
  I find the room configurations on booking.com are harder for families. Bnbs usually have more configurable space so it’s good to know sleeping surfaces and whatnot. Booking.com has typical listings if I want to search for single rooms or number of beds. But they aren’t “trustworthy” for what actually sleeps 3,4, or 5 people.
tacker2000 3y ago
For big groups or families with kids it might make more sense, since the places are generally larger than a standard double hotel room. But for the classic solo traveler or couple, a hotel is the better option nowadays. Dont really know how the ratios here are but i would guess solo/couple is about 70% of travels?
- raziel2p 3y ago
  Even as a couple, we prefer to pay extra to have a kitchen and a living room to just hang out in. If we literally just need a place to sleep a hotel is fine, but we enjoy actually living in the place we're visiting. That being said, the premium you have to pay on this now has become so high that we often reconsider.
  - xnorswap 3y ago
    Perhaps my experience is biased toward higher end hotels, but I find a good hotel far far more relaxing than an apartment. Hotel have bars, lounges, lobbies and sometimes terraces. Where everything is catered for you and staff are there to attend to your needs. If you have any issues or questions about the local area, a receptionist or concierge can help and advise. Compared to my (admittedly limited) experience with AirBNB where getting any information from the "hosts" felt hostile, and the arrival experience alone often mired by instructions to effectively sneak into your place of stay because it's not supposed to be for holiday lets. That can't compare to walking into a hotel and having your bags taken off you by a porter while simultaneously being handed a drink (if desired).
    - amerkhalid 3y ago
      I never understood the appeal of AirBnB. All these points about having a kitchen or living room to hangout sounded negative to me. But someone finally explained. It is vacation vs travel. I’m a vacationer, I don’t want to deal with parking, cooking food, cleaning the place. On vacations, I just want to relax and probably spend as much time out doing things as possible. When tired and not sleepy, I rather hangout in hotel lobby or by pool. Travelers want to experience new places like locals. So AirBnB appeals to them because they can do grocery shopping in local stores, experience different parts of city that normal tourists don’t.
hef19898 3y ago
In the last years, our experience is pretty much the oposite, in Europe that is.
- CalRobert 3y ago
  Funny enough I really only use Airbnb in Europe (we live in Europe). I've heard nightmares of people being expected to practically do home renovations before checking out in the US but haven't come across that here. Maybe I've just been lucky.

otteromkram 3y ago

Airbnb's business is to enrich the pockets of homeowners/landlords and place travelers in potentially dangerous situations with little in the way of recourse or resolution. If you hate your family, friends, and coworkers, feel free to recommend that they use the service.

pipes 3y ago
Well I find it really useful for taking my family on holiday. Hotels are not good places to bring very young kids and the prices are way out of our range. Of course it's designed to make money for hosts. I live in Edinburgh and over the last ten years I've witnessed a change that isn't something I want. The old town is more or less a filthy theme park where few residents can or would want to live. Lots of my co workers used to live there. It's a shame. I have friends who've got a lot of noise issues with an Airbnb opposite their tennement / block. Hopefully some sensible planning laws can be brought in that don't kill Airbnb in the city but limit it some how. Edit and I wish Airbnb would include all fees in the advertised price
- dkqmduems 3y ago
  Airbnb is good for travel but not where you live?
  - HWR_14 3y ago
    It's bad for residents but good for travelers is a perfectly coherent statement.
    - true_religion 3y ago
      Right. I lived across the street from a hotel in DC. People were always drunk and rowdy, or having proms. The area was fantastic for nightlife and dining though... which I think is something AirBNBs sometimes lack. They bring all the downsides of a hotel to residents, but they're not in a light commercial zone so the residents don't have any of the upsides of hotel district either.

keiferski 3y ago

This sort of comment always appears on Airbnb threads and it makes me scratch my head. Airbnb is not the same price as a hotel in the overwhelming majority of places in Europe. Especially if you are an individual and just want to rent a room (not an entire apartment.) And even then, the apartments are absolutely cheaper. I can’t imagine this is limited to Europe, either. I’m not familiar with the new NYC law, but assuming it doesn’t affect bedrooms, only full apartments: it’s absolutely cheaper than a hotel. Good luck finding a hotel for less than $100 a night anywhere in the five boroughs.

ceph_ 3y ago
I don't fully agree all of the top commenters points, but I do on their price one. Airbnbs used to be significantly cheaper than hotels and now, in many metros throughout the world, they're comparable. It's just down to tradeoffs on what you're looking for. You can get a kitchen and a bit more space with an airbnb, but you give up on the hotel amenities of support/cleaning staff, and lounge/gym spaces. Don't get me wrong, I usually value a full kitchen over maid service. But I was able to stay at nobu for a comparable price to a 2 bedroom in Barcelona. I do agree with your point about renting a room in someones place. But that's now a small fraction of airbnb's business compared to renting a full place.
- keiferski 3y ago
  I have used AirBnbs nearly a hundred times and they are never comparably priced to hotels. But this seems to be an anti-Airbnb hate fest, not a rational discussion, so obviously data isn't relevant here.
  - travisporter 3y ago
    Or, consider that Airbnb is different in different countries and experience varies accordingly.
    - keiferski 3y ago
      I guess? I've used it in over a dozen countries in Europe, probably ±20 cities in the US, Morocco, Japan, Turkey, and more that I can't remember. I've never had any issues, beyond a few things with the space itself (e.g., the street was really noisy when the windows were left open.) Maybe a few could have been cleaner, but again, nothing that was nightmarish. In my experience, hosts have been about half very cool and friendly and half professional, but minimal. My guess is that the people with extremely negative experiences either didn't look at reviews before booking and/or are the type that trash hotel rooms and have issues with spending 2 minutes cleaning up after themselves. Ask anyone that's worked in hospitality: that type of person is sadly very common.

danpalmer 3y ago

> they've got a good brand, but that's pretty much all they've got. I wouldn't underestimate this. I recently went on holiday, and while I ended up booking on Booking.com as I have done for all my recent trips, I still described the place I stayed in as an AirBnB when asked by friends where I was staying. That will last a long time and is arguably the "hard bit", turning that into revenue won't take much. I was even doing most of my browsing on AirBnB. I think AirBnB have just missed the budget end a bit. If you want to stay in a nice place there are some amazing places, and with their Super Host program the mid to high end is well catered for. What has been lost is the budget end where so much of the market is, and which Booking.com is excellent at. I'm a fairly budget conscious traveller and find AirBnB to be average to poor value for money now. A new budget conscious program where you still know you aren't going to get placed in a glorified hostel would be great.

thiago_fm 3y ago
I wouldn't underestimate it, but comparing the balance sheet of Booking.com and airbnb you see that booking is crushing it and Airbnb in an overvalued company (with meh growth. Last quarter for example, Airbnb had timid growth, meanwhile Booking did much better. For the current size Airbnb is (not as big as Booking.com), and market valuation, I'd have much higher expectations for it.

user3939382 3y ago

Booking.com yet another company I’ll never trust with dark patterns in their UI that hides fees.

corbezzoli 3y ago
Dark patterns aplenty, but hidden fees? I don’t think there's a single hotel booking site that shows taxes by default unless required by law. Maybe Google Search? I use Booking.com plenty and it's pretty predictable. Agoda on the other hand has super… ahem "flexible" prices that change at every reload, or depending on how you reach the site, or on your cookies, or…
- prepend 3y ago
  > single hotel booking site that shows taxes by default unless required by law That doesn’t make it not suck. Not hiding fees doesn’t mean “we always show what’s legally required.” As a customer I want to know how much things cost. It’s a pain to not know taxes when shopping rooms. Especially since I rarely know city taxes and some hotels have different taxes because they are “resort” or “convention” or whatever tax rules exist for a particular jurisdiction.
  - corbezzoli 3y ago
    Totally agree, I'm just saying it's unfortunately a standard across the industry, it's not just Booking. You're always allowed to set "show full price", which is then remembered after the first visit. It's the first thing I do whenever I compare prices across sites. Overall I find Booking pretty neat, once you get past all the "449 people booked this room in the last 4 seconds" bs. Having said that, Agoda has the lowest price most of the time, so I put with their bs even more willingly.
    - user3939382 3y ago
      It’s a standard in the US because of lacking consumer protection laws. Some countries don’t allow these companies to play these games and the advertised rates are the real rates.

pjmlp 3y ago

I am an heavy user of both, and have had plenty of good experiences and much cheaper locations in Airbnb than Booking, specially from those hosts that sell in both platforms.

grotorea 3y ago

Naively speaking, but if it's the same price as an hotel, that just means there's enough demand for AirBnBs to push prices up to equality, no? Isn't that good for AirBnB? Sure it probably means it doesn't make sense for say, busy business travellers, but there's people who want AirBnBs.

creer 3y ago

Airbnb started a large arbitrage process. Kinda the same one booking.com and the others are in. It's the nature of the game of arbitrage that it changes. That is its fundamental characteristic. Arbitrage is not static. Airbnb helped owners (and renters) realize they had an under-expoited asset. And travellers realize that hotels were over-priced and feature-poor. And consumers that booking services (travel agents) were often lax and complacent and sometimes true gems. Etc We are now in the phase where some Airbnbs really are overpriced as seen from the consumer side. But perhaps perfectly priced as seen by the owner (who perhaps wants fewer but higher priced rental days to better fit their own hassle overhead.) There is space for the prices to bounce around. And for some consumers they are still what they want: as others described, if you want more than a couple days and you want a real living place as opposed to just a place to sleep and desk. Does it mean that AirBnB disappears? Of course not. But their business has really changed, yes. Have they adapted enough? Are they continuing to adapt enough? What sounds more of a problem to me is that Airbnb has not solved its hassle issue: The inventices for the reviews to be effective don't seem right to me. And it has not solved its issue of relations with governments / voters: the supply of Airbnb is threatened pretty much everywhere. And while booking.com and the others seem highly diversified, perhaps not so for Airbnb.

thiago_fm 3y ago
That's true, it enabled people to explore that sector on their own, that typically meant a big investment (hotels/real state is expensive AF) Now it's basically: have a property and enjoy doing the backoffice of short term rentals (cleaning/basic accounting/being a host), and then you are essentially competing for customers that would typically go to a hotel/hostel. But if you think about it rationally, Hotels, even very cheap ones should be able to offer more services for less, given that a hotel cleaner can go room after room doing the work. The same is for other utilities like swimming pool etc, as it's shared, it's cheaper. There used to be a time when hotels were more expensive even though you could get an apartment for yourself with a pool and all those services, as well cleaning fees were lower. Nowadays after the arbitrage happened, things are more evened out. Anyways, I understand that for people with money or certain conditions, Airbnb is more interesting, but I can't see that model having a scale bigger than the old way, it's just a niche, and I think Airbnb at the moment fail to make that niche as profitable as the main thing.