After staying in a crack house in Barcelona, a dirty dark hole in Manhattan, a "private" villa in France where the owner was screwing an endless stream of boyfriends behind the flimsy kitchen door at 10AM, a thermite infested apartment in Sicily with horrid beds, I still feel like a total asshole when leaving a negative review. I'm not sure why I keep going back to it.
A place that turns out to be right on the noisy highway won't have a single review that points this out. Only "great for early risers!"
My strategy is to just not review if my review wouldn’t be positive.
Been using Airbnb quite a lot in Europe the last few months though and I have generally found some very high quality and accurately advertised listings — only had 1 that really fell below expectations.
In NYC all of the Airbnb inventory is bedbug-ridden hovels. Perhaps this simply reflects the housing stock of the region.
It does depend on more than just the city.
It really depends on the country. Israeli Airbnbs are usually not fantastic because people don't really know how to this stuff properly even if they are generally nice and want you to have a pleasant stay (and the prices are crazy). A well-chosen* airbnb in Ireland, on the other hand, is usually superb.
*Which entails trawling through several pages of reviews and looking for small details.
Thermite can't really infest things.
You probably mean “Thermian”.
(Ok, more likely: “termite”.)
I hope you meant termite [0] and not thermite [1]
I sometimes wish I could use thermite against some infestations... wouldn't be surprised if cockroaches evolved to survive that too.
But hotels do the exact same thing. I don't see how that's super incredible?
For me, there have been several rare occasions when I needed a room at last minute, but HotelTonight was never actually cheaper than any other aggregators or booking directly with the hotel. All being equal I vastly prefer booking direct so I get my points and elite benefits. I guess they have a fancy interface, and that's... it? Maybe it's market dependent (I only tried it in NYC and SF)?
I absolutely love it.
- You can trust that the hotels are good enough. Never had a bad experience
- Takes <15s to book
- They have their own rewards system which really starts to add up the more you use it
- They may never give you the absolute cheapest option available in that city for that night, but you'll get an amazing deal on a higher-quality hotel
- My experience using other booking sites for 'cheap deals' has been that you're often treated as a lower-tier customer, for example being given worse rooms (ground floor, no windows etc). The HotelTonight experience is the opposite. ~25% of the time, I receive a room upgrade without asking
- No hidden charges
I'm not a person who is loyal to a brand by nature. But HotelTonight is the closest I've come to feeling that way so far.
They're all OTAs. You're just as likely to get a "good" room with HotelTonight as you would with Priceline, Hotwire, etc. The quality of room you receive is mostly dependent on room availability and the check-in agent.
Maybe it changed in the mean time, but googling "airbnb phone number" showed it right in the search page. That info came from https://www.airbnb.com/help/contact_us, wherein clicking "It's something else" shows a "Call us" option, which has the number.
You get decent discounts with their loyalty program, which doesn't work with points, but just tracks your spend on the platform and levels you up as you spend more.
I think a huge factor for me using it is their customer service. You can text them via the app over anything and they'll respond back pretty quick. You also get upgraded "concierge" service as you level up, though I didn't find this to be that much better.
I'm worried that AirBnb will ruin HT since they have such horrible customer service. Hopefully they don't. It's nice not planning your hotels far in advance, land in a city, and take it from there.
I did this 7 different times all around France. It was a perfect experience. The fact that the UI/UX makes super duper easy to view, book, set, & forget. I think its better than opening a chrome tab or any other mobile app thus far.
Don't even try to compare to other sites desktop experience. I can book everything before you would launch a chrome tab. Lastly, every time I showed up to the reserved hotel (usually later), everything was taken care of and never was my reservation, lost, not taken, or a problem with rooms. THE UI/UX is the reason this app is so amazing.
If you're trying to find a comfortable and quiet bed after 2 flights and a train, airbnb, even with "book it now" is a nightmare waiting/organizing game, direct booking in foreign languages with different tax/fee structures can be really confusing.
For instance, in Paris I ended up in a $450/ni 5 star hotel, and was ~$30 away from playing french phone tag for a room in a shared airbnb apartment.
I think every major hotel chain guarantees that their direct price is the lowest, and why wouldn't it be when there is no middleman, so why go anywhere else when you've found the hotel you want?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_Key
Edit: I'm going to have to retract my comments about cheapest price being on official hotel brand websites. I did a cursory search and find many cheaper options on Hotel Tonight (and expedia) for same day reservations than the brands, and while I haven't looked at all the brand's best price guarantees, at least IHG's exempts them from having to provide the lowest price within 24 hours of checkin, so it seems like a loophole to let them dump rooms for cheaper on third party websites day of arrival.
People at some point realized this though and the individual hotel sites had to promise to be the cheapest to hope to get visitors at all.
that is the hard bit right? I guess you can showroom with expedia etc then book with the hotel direct.
I'm concerned, like others, that contracts and deals will evaporate as they end (as part of AirBnB)
I hope they keep HT as clean as it has been as the regular Airbnb experience is starting to feel like Booking.com; hidden fees and endless fake sense of urgency among other growth tactics.
This news is devastating. My least favorite lodging company just bought my most favorite.
My question would be -- what other apps provide an experience close to what HT did?
One time my wife and I had way too much to drink and surprisingly, even in the middle of nowhere Ohio (Cedar Point) I was able to book a place right near the park from my phone while waiting in line for a rollercoaster. Very rad.
Big feature: geo-specific deals. Makes sense from a business perspective as it's Hotel Tonight, which mean hotels may have excess inventory near you for that night who's rate could be instantly negotiated down.
Changes the whole travel calculation, do you book ahead for peace of mind or wait until the night of to see if you get a good geo-specific deal?
The points and perks are also an added benefit, like not having to physically checkout at the front-desk for certain hotels once you've attained a "perk level" (read: loyalty points).
I will say I'm a little tepid about this deal, although very happy for the HT folk for what hopefully is a decent exit. I hope this only helps the app grow and offer more features and stay true to core, although it will likely be absorbed into the Airbnb app experience
Booked a solid $134 room in Leicester Square at about 3pm same day. Went great.
Booked an $82 room at an EWR hotel, a little cheaper than other OTA rates including apaglobal. Went fine.
They seemed to have access to consolidator-style inventory at rates lower than I found in the markets where I was looking on the dates where I was looking.
Ive also used it in LA, SF, bumfuck Arizona, etc. Each time I got better deals. But I used it to find hotels day of.
Agreed that points and benefits not being given sucks, but that's the case with any 3rd party. HT's loyalty definitely adds up, though.
I'm hoping this is basically the expansion that happens. When hosts have emergencies, AirBnB can offer a local backup :)
Where it is fantastic is in UX. It is simple, clean and staggeringly efficient. And I've used it on three continents equally well.
I'm in Miami/Orlando.
It was pretty quick and easy.
The room and the hotel were meh.
B. is the 7th largest internet company in the world but because it’s in Amsterdam and not US based, hardly anyone think about them. They have incredible technology, often on-par with the big ones but I’m not anyone here could name one problem where they pionnered a solution.
Disclaimer: I used to work for one of their subsidiaries.
By what measure? Just checked and it's not market cap, not revenue, not number of employees, and not earnings.
Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, Alibaba would be the huge ones. Then Salesforce, PayPal. Don’t know Alipay and Uber market cap space yet if they are internet companies.
I don’t know if you can include companies like Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco as internet companies. If you include Microsoft, still puts Booking into top 10.
Fun fact from some years ago: It used to be a head-to-head race for 2nd between Booking and Ebay (when ebay was at their peak and included PayPal).
PS: dealing with hotels is playing with decades old technology. I think they’re doomed to keep a flexible and tried and true stack to deal with all the atrocities they’ll have to adjust to.
Doesn't help what exactly? Lots of Amazon.com still runs in perl so not sure why this matters.
Having every hotel on the planet requires some very heavy-handed growth teams and they have impressive talent there. It also requires to develop very flexible solutions and, even of the main code-base has some problem, that flexibility is worth mentioning.
There are three areas where I’ve seen some world-class internal products (on par with what I’ve seen at Facebook): data engineering, A/B testing, Machine learning hosting and serving. I’ve asked them to open-source and started what I could to help them do that, but they are far from being able to do it.
This user's perspective is the opposite.
Also as they are one of the king of the hill, any move in the market is basically a move against them. For now at least I am not sure there will be that much impact.
HotelTonight has been awesome there. You can get a representative on live chat and resolve most issues while you're still en-route from the airport.
On one hand, I am hopeful Airbnb will be able to learn from HotelTonight, but in reality, it seems most acquisitions end up with the acquired company diffusing into nothingness :(
(Not affiliated with AirBnb, but I had a chat with the tech lead of their business travel team last year).
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.
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.
Found one article mentioning this [1].
Edit: but could be these don’t apply to last minute or same day reservation. Looks like for example Hotels.com best price guarantee excludes these.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2018/sep/15/australians-t...
If you’re a biz traveler and your flight is delayed or getting in late the comfort of knowing you can enter a hotel that is big, easy to find, and lobby open and attended to 24/7 is much more comforting than anything you can book on Airbnb. It’s hard to argue with.
I really hope that's the case, I love Hotel Tonight but will absolutely stop using it if I end up getting someone's condo. Regardless, I'm worried that hotel selection will go way down. They keep emphasizing boutique hotels, but that's not people go to Hotel Tonight for. I could definitely see large hotel chains not wanting to do business with Airbnb though...
1. Buy company
2. Draft press release saying "nothing to see here, folks"
3. Wait a year
4. Company absorbs what they like, discards the rest
So it's good for them to get the constant business (similarly to how Groupon works) but I can't help but feel that more of that $20 should have gone to the hotel staff, especially maids doing the actual work of cleaning up after everyone.
To me, running a bunch of web services to book rooms could be done on a properly configured computer taking 10,000 reservations a second for ~$10 per month. So the cost for booking apps has got to be mostly logistical (getting hotels onboarded with the organization, paying for liabilities, etc).
My question is, will competition in these spaces ever lower the fees and free up more money for labor? Or are we entering an endgame where labor gets relegated to the shadows?
To be sure, I'm not arguing there isn't a lot of waste at these large companies, but running a large eCommerce business at scale is a hugely complicated endeavor. For one, the economics of large OTAs mean that very small increases in conversion rates can result in huge increases in revenue, so they all have very large teams optimizing their sites, running a ton of A/B tests, optimizing their search advertising bidding, etc.
Yes, it definitely would be possible to build a fairly straightforward hotel booking site with a very small number of people. To do it in a way that makes any money is a much more difficult problem.
I travel a lot for work (100+ nights per year).
Sometimes I stay for 2+ nights, often it's just a 1-night stop over.
For 2+ nights, I almost always go with an AirBnB - more space to cook/work/think etc.
For 1 night though, AirBnBs are too much hassle. I don't want to have to choose a great location from a long list which includes some terrible options. I just want a clean bed, bathroom and decent wifi in a good location. HotelTonight gets me that in under 30s.
I'm not sure how AirBnB locations can/will be built into HotelTonight - after all HotelTonight is all about ease of use, low friction and flexibility. The very things AirBnBs are bad at (coordinating check in times etc).
I expect them to just show hotel tonight data in the airbnb interface. From the press release:
> We are making it easier for people who use Airbnb to find last-minute places to stay when Home hosts are often already booked. The availability of boutique hotels—in addition to private rooms and entire homes that are instantly bookable—helps ensure authentic, high-quality stays are available on-demand, especially at the last minute.
I think about it this way all the time: AirBnB bought the product for X price, because they think it will help them make Y more money. They don't even need to "merge" as long as the product is profitable but if they can get even 1% more with a cross over, then AirBnB (the parent co) is making even more money (with more risk ofc)
Every OTA does last minute bookings now...reality is what they offer has been largely commoditized.
My anecdotal understanding was that HotelTonight was doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Some component of that $130m may have been secondary stock sale.
I don't think we have enough data to determine what the price might have been, or how well employees will do.
Family trips are always in apartments. It's just nicer than Hotels.
Also, I find hotels pretty sad in general but that's maybe because I worked in some:)
Edit: typo
I've had great success finding good places to stay by using AirBnb as a catalogue, then Googling the property and booking through the owner's own website. Last year we stayed in a lovely house in Bruges for less than half the price it would have been if I'd booked through AirBnb.
A big player acquiring an orthogonal product...most likely meaning they'll just kill it. I doubt hotels will partner with AirBnB on a booking service.
A hotel working with Airbnb is like BlockBuster working with Netflix to share customer data. The hotels groups aren't as fucking stupid as Blockbuster was, though.
I am the furthest thing from a luddite, but I personally prefer (as I know many others) hotels to Airbnb. There's a consistency to the hotel product that you can't get with Airbnb that I place a premium on, especially for short or last minute stays.
I'm also not really sure why Airbnb is considered a "tech" co in the same way FB or Netflix is. There's is no real time component to the app, and it isn't dealing with billions of people using the app at the same time like a FB or Google is. In the few times I've used Airbnb over the years I'm honestly surprised by how little "tech" really permeates my experience (i.e. its just a basic web app that facilitates the listing + payment transfer + messaging...once I've made the reservation and paid Airbnb's job is essentially done).
However, if I'm traveling by myself or with my partner, hotels still seem the way to go. Valet parking in a city centre with room service can make a stay much comfortable.
Personally I think the term "tech company" is a little more of a blanket statement these days. Virtually every large organization has some "tech" aspect to them.
Do you mostly stay in hotels for business reasons? Or are you just rolling in money?
For example, their post about their work in search ranking is quite interesting [1].
[1]: https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/machine-learning-power...
Every time I try to use Airbnb I have to 'request' from the host and I swear 4 out of 5 times they cancel the requested rental because they're staying in the place or some other BS. I know when I get a hotel room its instantly reserved and there is no question about its availability.
Although some Airbnbs may beat a hotel in every way, consistency holds true value in certain situations.
I don't feel like this analogy applies, however. You can make the argument that hotels are better than AirBnB. It depends on what you value. If you are business traveler (or heck maybe even not), you probably prefer a hotel because you know you are getting a consistent product and experience each time and there is more avenues for you to have your grievances resolved, and quickly -- i.e. "my room stinks I need a new one now" or if you even mention bed bugs the county health department will be there faster than you can post that AirBnB complaint.
If you are a vacationer trying to stay in some obscure location and need somewhere to stay, you probably value AirBnB more.
- Airbnb are going to "create their own content" and try to kill the hotels eventually (very unlikely), or
- Airbnb take too large a cut (possible).
They probably want to put Airbnb listings as options on the hotels tonight app.
I'm not sure. It may be harder to book future dates with HT after the contracts expire, but in my experience HT is most useful when AirBnB isn't (same day booking.)
I'd imagine hotels probably like the last minute bookings. Also you can book at 1 or 2am when hotwire cuts you off at midnight and many other ways of booking stop working after about 10pm.
I believe a good portion of large hotels are aware that at some point they will need to tap into the Airbnb market and if that marketplace (Airbnb) manages to create an environment where both sides can live or directly compete with each other, everyone (winners mostly) will be happy with the outcome.
The real tricky part is that synergy can be difficult to have and different players (hotel customers, airbnb customer, hotels, airbnb renters) may have different degrees of resistances to Airbnb plan.
I think their main focus will be to create a B2B environment that will make big ticket customers (e.g. IBM) want to use their system to get either a rented place or a hotel room for their consultants and business travelers. Lots of money to be made in this area.
Whereas, with Airbnb, they cover any damages that guests may do or issues that may arise from the hosts as well.
You can see how this works in this video I made here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdrFYb4otTs
The entire app is designed to trick people about what the actual prices are. The founder is a total scumbag and belongs in prison.
Also, it's unfair to characterize it as a scam if it's printed clearly in the costs. It's your responsibility to read what you're paying for.
It isn't, which is why I posted the video showing that.
On the screen you can very clearly see:
Room (1 Night): $180
Taxes & Fees: $32
Total: $221
In other words, they're purposely trying to hide the fact that the page is scrollable or that there is more content (the fine print) after the fold, and are trying to lead the buyer to believe that they already have the full pricing information before hitting the Pay button.
If the fine print that included the resort fee was above the Payment button then that would be one thing, but it's purposely designed so that you can't even see that the fine print even exists.
It is? In some countries, perhaps. It shouldn't be, and it needn't be, given just a little bit of consumer-friendly regulation of how prices are advertised.
If the hotel wants to charge their own fee separate from the app then that's not a problem at all. The problem is the Hotel Tonight lying about what the prices are.
I've seen this for as long as I can remember: https://imgur.com/a/GsyPKPJ
It clearly displays the resort fee in the hotel information, and before the payment.
What should one do with money and clout?
Build a thing...
What type of thing?
AirBnBs are consumed by primarily individuals/couples
How provid?
Welp - where do they go?
They have the data.
So - how about buy up and build tiny-home communities in highest ABnB places?
Partner with Epic Tiny Home providers such as WindRiverTinyHomes
Why not throw that clout around on city planning depts whi dont know how to zone, divest parcels... Alameda is an example - whom I have spoken with about just this
Why not work with Warren Buffets Manufactured Homes groups (whom I have spoken with) to make an inventory....
Why not do many things...
Fuck AIRBnB - have a 20 year vision.
Build a freaking community based on a bolt-on tiny home over a shared common infrastructure in a very common design-build model. (Ive designed built gas stations, fast food, cell sites, data centers, and millions of square feet) - there are LOTs of people like me.
Go build something.