I would too, but the thing holding me back is if the shit hits the fan, and I need to do something like buy a freezer to store extra food, I can't conveniently do that in an Airbnb. And if I somehow get sick, I'm at the mercy of the doctors and hospitals in this foreign land. I'd rather be in my own home with the doctors and hospital system that I'm familiar with. I think more than 50% of people feel this way, which is why I think a 50% cut in revenue is too little, I would say its more like an 80-85% cut in revenue. This is catastrophic for Airbnb.
If shit hits the fan, there won't be freezers to be bought... they'll get panic purchased instantaneously and, if you did manage to find one for sale, expect it to cost multiple times what you otherwise might have paid.
Jeebus how is this possible - is our supply chain that fragile that things like hand sanitizer (that you can make with alcohol + aloe gel) and freezers run out?
Why is there no increased demand-driven supply on these things?
They have a functional system. If they can maintain it going on the cheap, they can pull themselves back up. Still, this gives times for alternatives to come and drink their milkshake.
They do have functional infrastructure but their business is suffering a catstrophic shift. As I mention, a lot of the hosts are either going to go into foreclosure or they will convert to long term rentals. A lot of people were buying condos and converting them to Airbnb because the revenues were so predictable. That won't happen in 2020 and 2021. It will take many years for inventory to come back up to 2019 levels and less inventory means less revenues, even if people started to travel again, which also is unlikely in the next couple of years.
I think it’s highly unlikely that an upstart is going to steal a noticeable amount of market share from AirBnb during this pandemic. It would be hard enough during normal times when travel volume is much higher.
That would mean that a lot of people would avoid going to the US or other countries where health care is complicated and/or expensive. And I would harbor a guess that travel insurance companies will put in anti-pandemic clauses going forward. That has already started by the way, so who knows what insurers will cover in late 2020.
To my mind, a freezer is a pretty low priority item if you are trying to mitigate “shit hits the fan” tail risk. You can easily survive without a freezer, and a dependency on a freezer isn’t a good thing in that scenario. Then you just have a bunch of food that’s doing to go bad if the power goes out.
