To me AirBnb is like a hotel, except:
- No gym, sauna and other SPA facilities included
- No breakfast buffet, restaurants or room service available
- No room upgrades available
- No early check in/late check out available
- No 24/7 access available
- No reception desk 24/7 available where I can ask for good recommendations, learn a bit more about the place without feeling awkward to ask or risk being sucked into a long unnecessary conversation
- No easy way to voice complaints or raise concerns if something goes wrong
- No extra facilities such as laundry, flower service, etc.
- No other guests which I can meet in the lobby, at the bar and so on to socialise
On the other hand I get this at AirBnbs:
- Having difficulties to access the property because hosts want to meet somewhere in a place which suits them but not me
- Sometimes waiting for the house/flat keys longer than expected
- Sometimes being told on arrival how some things "recently" broke and that they won't be available during my stay
- Awkward hellos and good byes
- Awkward random house rules
- Awkward access restrictions such as can't open this gate after X hour, and so on
- A lot of fake friendliness as long as you don't raise any concerns
- Difficulties to raise issues and getting refunds
- A lot more which I can't think of now, but left me with a really bad aftertaste every time
When finding chalets or cabins/lodges for outdoor trips, Airbnbs are often much better located.
To me it is not so much hotels they need to replace, but a streamlining of booking vacation houses to the point where it is almost as convenient as hotel bookings are, but with vacation house amenities.
Some people are confused and surprised they expect hotel services(airbnb is to blame for this as well) instead of more "adventurious" accomodation offered by private owners.
AirBnB is the eBay of short term rental with the good and bad parts. Booking.com used(and mostly still is) more a kind of Amazon.
They also did $3B+ in revenue last year so they are clearly very successful.
- Don't care about the gym.
- I'd rather cook my own food.
- Rent a nice place, upgrade not needed.
- I've never rented a place that had awkward check-in/out times.
- Not sure what you mean? If you rent the whole place, you can come and go as you please.
- Airbnb facilitates online chat with the owner.
- Never had a concern that needed raised.
- Rent a place with laundry
- I'd rather go to a local place than a hotel bar
- I only meet the host about 1/3 of the time and it's always been at the house. The other 2/3, the house has a key box or similar for access.
- Never happened to me
- Never happened to me
- Never happened to me
- Never run into weird rules
- Never run into this either
- Never run into this. Hosts have always been professional.
- Refunds through Airbnb have been easy (I have several this year)
AirBnB's best-case "ideal" setup has always struck me as just "CouchSurfing[0] but monetised". While AirBnB has received a lot negative press for facilitating the letting of would-be residential property by large-scale professional landlords, the marketing from AirBnB's side has always favoured the "local guide, personal human experience" angle, an angle CouchSurfing has always tried to cover non-commercially.
So in my mind it's a comprehensively bankrupt proposition from either side of the spectrum. It's worse than a hotel (no service), worse than traditional self-catering tourist apartments (more expensive), worse than a long-term let (a LOT more expensive) and infinitely worse than the social, warm-fuzzy personal experience of CouchSurfing (free).
I don’t want a couch, I want a whole home that our group can share, and for less than the surge price that a hotel will slap on for a single room, we can fit our needs well.
Call me cynical, but "Advertise your product for a use that your core moneymaking market doesn't do" would be a good dark pattern to avoid scrutiny/regulation.
It feels like every other booking ends up with an email like "this is our childhood/lovely/whatever reason place, we are very picky about who we accept and we except you to treat it as your home, can you confirm you would do that?". Every single time I roll my eyes. It's not like I'm paying them more than a hotel for the privilege of staying there.
But I do agree that it's becoming harder to justify Airbnb use. As it's popularity has risen, it feels like, what was once a cheap stay in someones house, is now the same price as a nice bed & breakfast. And with Hotel's seeing the lost footfall, the gap between a private room in a strangers home and a hotel room with much more privacy has become smaller and smaller.
I've used it every week for about 8 years now for my accommodation when working away but couldn't see using it much in the future
- Want to rent an entire house in some specific area
- Want to rent something as cheap as possible / on a strapped budget.
Very cheap travel/plane tickets and accommodation has made international travel very accessible for a lot of people around the globe. So I can absolutely see why some people swear to using airbnb - but for me? I'll rather pay the extra $50 for a hotel room. That's chump change for peace of mind, IMO.
Actually in my mind, Airbnb is always more expensive than a hotel. Each trip I end up checking both options and I'm amazed at how expensive Airbnb ends up being after you add all the hidden fees.
I think the main use case is for big groups and gathering. When you want to stay with 10 people. And even then, it's still more expensive than 6/7 hotel rooms (if you come as a couple you would only use a single room).
I think Airbnb manage to convince a lot of people that they are always a better deal than hotels. I see a lot of my friends never checking regular hotels anymore.
But yes, for an entire house for a group of 4 - 6 people, it's great.
I don't know about the US, but certainly in Europe a shared room in a hostel is always much cheaper than anything on AirBNB if you're really on a budget.
- Airbnb plus or Airbnb Luxe can have breakfast or groceries basket
- Early check in or late check out is possible. Just discuss with your host prior to confirming reservation. Unless they have a guest coming just after or their cleaning crew can't make it work, they will find a way to make it work
- Many Airbnbs have 24/7 access. Many have electronic door locks
- You can get local, custom recommandations by discussing with the host, and more. Same for complaints
- Flower service, laundry, babysitting options are available with Airbnb Luxe
On the other hand, if your goal is to socialize, talk to hotel staff, talk to other travellers, then of course, airbnb are NOT an option for you. Airbnb doesn't have to provide everything. I can tell you they are great for families looking for a vacation home.
How would a solution to each of those for airbnb look like?
- Looks like they are significantly leaner now as a result of COVID. Cost of revenue is at an all-time low in Q3 (17% of revenue on p164). There's a lot of focus the drastic cuts to Sales and Marketing, but it looks like there's a fair amount of increased discipline across the board.
- It's interesting that Operations and support looks to be very similar in both the first 9 months of 2019 and 2020 despite having drastically different revenue numbers. They had to spend roughly the same amount (600 million) to support 30% less revenue
- Looks like China is a huge part of their future strategy, so much so that it is explicitly called out in their Executive Compensation bonus calculation (p271). I can think of exactly one other American consumer tech company that has had success in China.
AirBnB had tons and tons of listings in both places, all of which had specific instructions to tell the neighbors you were “a friend” and not staying there with AirBnB.
At the time, and possibly still so, AirBnB was not operating legally in those particular places, and I presume most of the country, but it’s such a good booking platform people used it anyways.
Long story short, I doubt China is not going to copy AirBnB, unless they can find a nice revenue share model with AirBnB the platform.
P.s. There is ripe opportunity to make apps that interface China to westerners traveling there. There was literally no way to hook into the QR payment system, get a Didi, navigate, or get good translations just 2 years ago. Good luck to those of you building products to help non Chinese people in China. You’ll do well.
Trying to stay under the radar seems like it courts risk of deportation, as I've known _lots_ of folks who got a visit from police at their place of stay who were not aware of this. Virtually all of them settled things fine but it was more headache than had they just done what they're supposed to.
I believe in a hotel stay, your hotel registers you online so that you don't have to deal with this.
Obviously there are tons of competitors in that area in China. They have far more employees and use typical Chinese aggressive marketing. The most notable one, Tijia cooperates with the main travel providers - CTrip, Expedia, Qunar. For me as a foreigner Airbnb works well, although in some rural areas it's better to go with Tijia.
Airbnb entered the Chinese market in 2015 – the same year in which Tujia became a unicorn. The global giant has been slow to expand in China, with 80,000 listings compared to Tujia’s 400,000. Indeed in 2017, Airbnb Inc's founders were moments away from merging their China business with Tujia. Chesky decided to block the deal out of concern that it would harm the Airbnb brand.
Afaik, Airbnb focuses on the quality of its listings. The company has visited thousands of houses and removed those that do not meet quality standards. The company launched Airbnb Plus, a premium service. The company works with opinion leaders and adapts its products to the market. Thus, apartments can be ordered through mini-programs in WeChat, and checkout using WeChat Pay and Alipay.
Link to article in Bangkok Post: https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/special-reports/1475857... (2017)
I just had to go to local PSB (police) office to register for staying as a foreigner.
The biggest problem was of course the language as the police haven't spoken a word of English. They also didn't know Poland (issuer of my passport) is a real country.
Is it? I always hated it. I'd be very curious to learn what makes it feel like a good booking platform. It doesn't even show you where the room is located! (only approximate location). Seems way worse than e.g. booking.com, the only reason really to use them might be lower prices... if they still have an advantage here, which I'm genuinely not sure anymore (a while ago I decided I don't want to deal with their crap regardless of how much money I might save).
[edit] "Is it?" was not a rhetorical question. I'm not upset or anything if you downvote, but can you also add what do you feel makes it a good platform? Or what did I say that was wrong?
That's not surprising to me at all. I'm sure their support and operations teams have been working insane hours during Covid dealing with cancellations, unclear lockdown/quarantine policies, more guest/host disputes, etc.
For example I often use Agoda or hotels.com when I travel in China.
I think AirBnB will have plenty of competition in China and broader Asia from well-established players such as CTrip, Agoda or Rakuten.
The "social network" (rating your visitors etc.) aspect of AirBnB I think will matter less in those parts of the world ... but maybe I am wrong and things will change.
I'm not saying the two services you referenced do or do not do well with the Chinese market, but it's a different proposition to actually capture a massive distinct market vs expansive options for the existing customer base.
Do you also question whether Ebay is a "tech" company?
To note, it feels like 'tech company' is a bit ambiguous these days and doesn't necessarily have great clarity.
Airbnb has made some non-trivial open source contributions that I'm aware of at least. There's a very popular eslint style guide based on their internal policies and they've also created an svg animation library (the name eludes me) which is popular with designers as it accepts Adobe AE as input.
Its quite surprising that CEO of Airbnb should make just $110k/ annum in base salary before the company goes public. I would expect it to be around $500k.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/11/overpaid-executi...
as I understand it the value of the RSUs is on the _grant date_ for such purposes. (and not at vesting)
Options on the other hand are a different beast.
Perhaps the money goes towards cloning costs?
If someone got shares in 2009 they likely had a substantially higher return.
Re: 2009. I recall an early employee saying YC told them not to hire anybody, but they hired him anyways off of his very creative outreach. But let me tell you they all earned every penny of it. It's hard to remember how crazy of an idea Airbnb was ~10 years ago.
The real question is though, going forward, what ROI will Airbnb deliver vs. the S&P 500.
Growth stocks seem to be nearing bubble territory at the moment, so if we get a repeat of the 2000s where interest rates start rising again and value stocks become more in favor, it doesn't look great.
Then again, selling fractionalized access to highly restricted real estate supply in all of the world's major cities doesn't sound like a bad bet for the future. If the lack of desire to invest in new construction in cities due to the covid narrative of cities being dead (obviously overblown) leads to further supply deficits, the future for Airbnb looks bright.
So in summation, its impossible to predict, buy index funds instead.
Depends on later stage dilution and what the pre-money is, but still a ridiculous markup. No comparison to S&P.
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/airbnb/company_finan...
> Most of our guests discover Airbnb organically, with approximately 91% of all traffic to Airbnb coming through direct or unpaid channels during the nine months ended September 30, 2020.
Anyone know what % of traffic to Bookings and Expedia (and others) are paid vs unpaid? 91% unpaid seems really high, and I wonder if it's because Airbnb is so differentiated / people want to "Airbnb" a place (vs. "stay somewhere")
edit:
> Our hosts had 7.4 million available listings of homes and experiences as of September 30, 2020, of which 5.6 million were active listings. We consider a listing of a home or an experience to be an “active listing” if it is viewable on Airbnb and has been previously booked at least once on Airbnb
IMO it's super sneaky to blend homes and experiences together
Great breakdown by Casey Winters on the strategies - https://news.greylock.com/four-strategies-to-win-big-with-lo... - showing that there are different strategies, and not one absolute best.
"Brand is an extension of the Airbnb model, not its own strategy. If the product doesn’t deliver on a differentiated experience, brand building usually does not create loyalty."
This post seems to say that AirBNB didn't just focus on brand, but they innovated on /somehow/ making booking UX "10x" (let's leave the ostensible 10 aside for a moment and just say "a lot" instead) better than incumbents. But that requires a durable product advantage, one that consistently creates a differentiated experience. It's more accurate to say that brand is a downstream side effect of the core product than a sole or primary focus.
At one point in the past I heard Booking was the largest spender, worldwide, on Adwords.
I wouldn't immediately consider the hotel metasearch products a problem for booking. It shifts traffic to different paid channels with different tradeoffs (eg. less fine grained control of spend if it's a revshare model). I ran the product development in marketing for a little while. Some years ago (ie. late in the game, largely due to politics), we started investing in cross channel attribution models to better direct spending.
Disclosure: I no longer work for Booking, though. I do work for Google, but am in NO way involved in Ads or travel and an not trying to comment on the company's business.
So they are definitely getting a tremendous amount of organic traffic because "Airbnb" became a verb like Google or Uber.
Especially around the fast growing millennial sector which is very focused around experiences and travel.
Definitely helps that Airbnb has become a verb - can't beat that.
now it’s just a boring business of terrible managed apartments with really bad amenities and problems that make you lose time and totally diverges you from the whole concept of hassle-free vacation/renting.
My last 5 airbnbs were apartments fully setted up to be rented in Airbnb just for the money and not for the experience and good service, every single one of them were so much problematic to check-in/check-out, I was charged insane cleaning fees even tho the places were not clean and were never cleaned, I had to deal with people putting cameras around totally disrupting your privacy, I had to deal with overcrowded apartments (some guy decided to rent every room in his place and sleep in the living room without mentioning it anywhere in the listing), I had to deal with last minute cancels that almost made me sleep in the street, etc.
Worth mentioning that all of those bad experiences came from places that were marked as "superhost" and had quite a lot of reviews.
Aand lastly, Airbnb decided to just void a 500$ giftcard that I got in 2018 and I tried to use early 2020 and they said it was invalid, I just lost the money.
Airbnb it’s just death for me
When I first started using airbnb, I would run into these awful listings because I was scraping the bottom of the proverbial barrel.
On a visit to Boston, I once stayed in a cheap AirBnb in the bad part of Methuen, MA, where the local grocer knew I was from out of town because I paid in cash and not food stamps.
My wife, on the other hand, always reads the reviews and I've never had a single bad experience travelling with her.
If you go by price you get what you pay for. This isn't a failing of AirBnb, its how life works.
If this was in California, gift cards cannot expire (with some exceptions). You might have a recourse there.
The risk vs rewards under this system would discourage bad hosts from joining the platform. For new, honest hosts, it would be a minor inconvenience at best.
This is so detached from reality. It would wipe out probably 99% of listings from people not doing it professionally.
fraudsters would easily game this. ask a bunch of their friends to "stay" , or even create a bunch of fake accounts and "be our guest"
Airbnb already holds the money for 24h after check-in, which is enough to defuse 99% of scams. The problem is the guests that book outside the platform, then claim they were scammed.
Anyone have thoughts on if that is possible or plausible?
https://www.airbnb.com/resources/hosting-homes/a/how-were-gi...
Disclosure: am employee
I admit, I ask mostly selfishly (my wife and I are superhosts, we have managed a full-time AirBnB in CA for 2 years). But it's also an interesting thought experiment. It would be quite the contrast to how the rideshare and food delivery companies treat their non-employees.
"At our request, the underwriters have reserved up to [blank] shares of Class A common stock, or [blank]% of the shares offered by this prospectus, for sale at the initial public offering price through a directed share program to: * Eligible U.S. hosts who hosted on our platform in 2019 and 2020 [...]"
Not sure what this means.
How does one figure whether the business will keep growing without blasting people's faces with ads? If so much spend on ads is required to generate revenue growth then there will either never be profits or the revenue growth will stall (and thus the equity is worth rather little), if ads are not required then why are they spending so much on them, or maybe when will they stop spending.
All the "heroes" of the tech boom (Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft) did not suffer from this problem - they were profitable before going public.
It feels like this time we're in an advertising bubble. Nearly every single S-1 submitted to HN has this feature.
I am genuinely puzzled by this, if someone can offer some perspective on how can you model something like this I would be grateful - what assumptions you'd be making here.
So scaling as fast as possible is the #1 goal, because if you don't someone else will and you'll go out of business.
Therefore sales and marketing is a huge factor in growth. Then the idea is, once you've grown as much as you can and it's too hard for others to compete because of your entrenched network effects, you can reduce sales and marketing to a a reasonable, highly profitable level.
That's it in a nutshell and it works in any market with strong network effects, which AirBNB strongly fits into, in facts it's a poster child for the concept. Yelp is another good example -- sign up all the restaurants before a competitor does.
There are a lot of different business models out there, which you can study (and MBA programs teach you). This is just one model, and it's a legitimate one. Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple all have different models from it (and all drastically different from each other as well).
To evaluate ad spend, you don't look at just short-term return. There's a reason that "lifetime value" is a critical concept for companies. It's fairly normal in large companies that, in a given year, you may spend more on ads than you gain from those ads - but you expect the customers you gain from them to continue spending over many years.
So you may spend $100 to gain a customer who spends $20 in the first year... then $40 in the second... then $80 in the third... now all of a sudden your return on that was positive, three years later.
These are the kind of ads you want to buy, even if in the short term it looks bad. These large marketing expenses should have compounding benefits over many years. The people who care about the short term like that are not the investors you want and not the people you're trying to please.
[1] https://howmuch.net/articles/worlds-top-50-biggest-advertisi...
However, I think H8crila meant that they did not spend that much on advertisement around the time they ipoed.
I am not saying advertising is bad, or that it doesn't work, or that you shouldn't do it. Nothing of this sort. It's just unclear to me what's the plan for eventually returning anything to the shareholder. All of the eventual value depends on this.
It also looks like Q3 tends to be their best quarter by far. Is that because of summer vacations?
I have, however, no hard data to back up if these are actually the reasons.
But Q3 was likely an anomaly since they saw a lot of tailwinds from greater demand for homes in driving distance for easier summer vacations plus Covid was only concentrated in a few hot spots over the summer.
Now Covid is more widespread plus there’s naturally less leisure travel in the winter and still very little rebound in business travel.
Still, I think long term the biggest issue is not rebounding demand, which I think will happen, but regulatory issues. Lots of questions and scrutiny around their impact on local housing and rental prices and safety issues related to home rentals for parties.
I would also guess that long term bookings are up
I'm reading this right, correct? I see the cash positions below are a bit different, but that's likely from... the loans?
2018 looked so hopeful. They only lose $20m total! 2019 should have been a profitable year, IMO, but they went with the aggressive strategy.
Don't forget, there was the announcement in April [0], they issued $1 billion of that debt at 10% interest, and it's convertible, which is equivalent to rate of about 12-13% non-convertible debt.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-paying-10-percent-int...
What the S1 says about that loan: Interest on the First Lien Loan is payable monthly or quarterly in arrears, at our option depending on the chosen per annum interest rate equal to (i) in the case of LIBOR borrowings, 7.5% plus LIBOR, subject to a floor of 1% (the “First Lien Eurodollar Rate”), or (ii) in the case of base rate borrowings, 6.5% plus the greatest of (a) the prime rate, (b) the federal funds effective rate plus 0.5%, and (c) LIBOR for a one-month period plus 1%, subject to a floor of 2%.
Revenue was up ~30%, but costs an expenses up ~50%, primarily SG&A and product development... basically they hired a lot of people it looks like.
While I've received signing bonuses in the past, I was not aware that you could get a signing bonus that was 4x of your base salary.
> Dave joins Airbnb from a 17-year career at Amazon, where he was most recently Vice President and CFO of their Worldwide Consumer Organization, which is responsible for all of Amazon’s global website sales including Amazon Prime and subsidiaries such as Whole Foods and Zappos.
For someone like that, you pay whatever you need to pay.
Put that together with some ridiculously low international air fare, like, RT SFO LHR for $700, pre-pandemic, and many more people will travel.
Maybe some areas. In Europe, Asia and Australia I have always found AirBNB more expensive than hotels which incidentally waste less of your time, have better signage and access, and can provide value-added services like multiple contactless keys, key replacement, waste disposal, laundry, holding luggage and local recommendations. Oh, and they support three sometimes-killer features: payment on arrival, cash, and pre-inspection of rooms.
If cities and townships were to have looser regulations on hotels - which evidently they should, given the vast demand and 'mostly' it's not excessively problematic for communities - then AirBnB wouldn't exist because hotel prices and types would have much more variety and competitiveness, and so would listings.
If anyone could just get in their car and tell the local dispatcher 'they want to drive tonight' - probably Uber would have never been able to come to fruition in the first place.
I'm not saying that either company is good or bad, or that the regulations are good or bad, rather, that the underlying business models depended on a kind of civil regulatory asymmetry.
Personally, I wish cities would adjust their regulations to be more appropriate, I don't think there needs to be an Uber or AirBnB.
I live in a 6 bedroom house, and only regularly use a couple of them. I decide to make one available for random people to stay, short term.
How do I find them? How do they find me? How does anyone find a regular hotel these days? That's why you need a website to coordinate.
These companies have a weird human shield - that prosecuting individual house owners or drivers has little tin no impact on the supply (whereas it would have a huge impact on a normal commercial supply) - so the usual weapon regulatory bodies have is simply useless.
* I've had two shit hosts that left me up a creek scrambling to find housing, as has my S/O. As a consumer, I am way less likely to use the platform now because my experience has shown me that AirBnB either doesn't care or doesn't have an effective lever to pull to improve this situation.
airbnb sides too much with the host in my experience.
When a host left me and my family in an unsafe environment due to a gas leak, airbnb was impossible to work with. It took months of escalation with airbnb to get things fixed, despite providing all the documentation required the same day that I didn't stay at the property and had to book a last minute hotel at increased cost.
:)
I'd recommend having the debate after meeting them instead of before. We had big doubts about this idea, but they vanished on meeting the guys.
It's interesting that pg also believed in the eventuality of AirBnB competing with and taking a lot of market share away from hotels. Fred and the "older" guys at their firm didn't believe this.
Turns out in most places it's profitable to arbitrage long term property cost and AirBnB income. So you have a bunch of small time operators buying or leasing property and putting them on AirBnB. AFAICT that seems to be the bulk of AirBnB business. Not Etsy (person to person) nor Hotels. But a new kind of "hotel" that consists of one person running a handful to a couple dozen apartments.
- Reducing full-time employee headcount by approximately 25% (I'm curious from what/to?)
- Setting expectation for the potential of no employee bonuses for 2020 and reducing executive team member salaries for six months (interesting that executive team _salary_ is getting reduced rather than bonuses, no? At this level isn't most of your compensation not direct salary?)
- (to the above point) , in May 2020, we announced a reduction in our workforce of approximately 1,800 employees (So I guess they had ~9,000 employees?)
- Outstanding RSU obligations are quoted as ~$2.7B
It seems fair to wonder, given the timing during a pandemic, that there's a need or desire to cash out by the investors and founders.
I wonder if their headcount downsizing wasn't severe enough. 9,000 employees seems like a lot for an intermediary. A lot of these companies seem to get in the habit of thinking they're the next Google long before they have the Google revenues to fund such pursuits.
The risks section reads as expected.
I do wonder if the tide is turning against home "sharing". Unlike ride-sharing, there are significant externalities to deal with. People don't generally don't want to live near an illegal (in many cases) hotel and it's not so easy for them to up and move. It's classic tragedy of the commons.
What's more AirBnB has (IMHO) a provable negative impact on the supply of rental units in many cities.
So cue the standard self-serving defense of AirBnB. I, for one, would not be sad to see it go.
I would think the IPO is happening despite the pandemic, not because of it. They had been planning to go public long before the IPO hit, so I wouldn't read into that too much. I definitely have similar reservations about the company as you do though. I get the impression the tide is generally turning against the airbnb model at least within major cities.
Also AirBnB just gets blamed for the rental shortage in many communities. The truth is poor zoning results in a shortage of rental units. Many areas with rental unit shortage have that shortage because zoning does not allow for high-density construction. The easiest solution to any shortage is to simply increase supply.
London says Hi!, where every garbage building that has some semblance of age is marked a Listed Property, and where it's more fashionable to let people be homeless/living in refurbished toilets than to build taller buildings because they would "destroy the character of the city".
Most people probably don’t want to check a dozen different sites (convenience) or don’t know which sites they can trust.
When I'm choosing a place for a vacation, again, I'm looking at the top brands I know of, including AirBnB. Since the major hotels all resemble my business hotels, I'm more or less stuck looking at AirBnB rentals, simply because it's a more casual brand that I know of. I assume the vast majority of casual travelers are just like me.
I've had very good experiences using AirBnB in smaller towns, even in otherwise poorer places in Asia and Europe. On the contrary, I've had shitty AirBnB experiences, mostly in large cities in developed markets.
Once demand and supply of the shares is established, they can announce a public price for the share on the date before the IPO.
My initial guess is that we can expect pricing of the IPO on the week of 12/14
A lot of that document talks about COVID-19 and how it's effected their business (no surprise there) but also several mentions of vaccines. Mostly in the following phrase (repeated 3 times in the document, I think):
> The extent and duration of the adverse impact of COVID-19 on the Company over the longer term remain uncertain and dependent on future developments that cannot be accurately predicted at this time, such as the severity and transmission rate of COVID-19, the extent and effectiveness of containment actions taken, including mobility restrictions, the timing, availability, and effectiveness of vaccines, and the impact of these and other factors on travel behavior in general and on the Company’s business.
2. Every single company in the world had to list COVID as a potential source of adverse effect to their business. It turned around whole economy and further impact is still unknown. And by every I literally mean every. Even companies like Zoom, that are super hot as a result of COVID - for them getting control of COVID will mean potentially big slides down.
Makes me wonder what the 2020 story would have been without COVID.
Personal bias makes me think Airbnb is here to stay and the marketing spend can definitely be cut back. The timeline to revenue growing back against their costs is probably 2 years with this pandemic though and that hurts anyone who is looking to invest and hold.
That’s interesting and I guess the big thing that makes this different than vrbo if they can grow the spare room side much more over time
At least that's my experience when I was trying to search on the site. There was little filtering available and the owners were listing their properties as anything.
For context: http://archive.is/xdv1u (NYT Article)
At least they're honest about it!
Revenue:
2020* 2.5billions
2019 4.9billions
2018 3.7billions
*until September.
When I reported the problem, the support rep claimed it happened that way because I had "Smart Pricing" on. It was set ON by default. But AirBNB's own documentation says the Custom Price I set for the dates in question (Xmas week) override all other pricing.
Even if "Smart Pricing" had applied, it shouldn't have offered the lowest price for the highest demand week of the year, because AirBNB's own calendar shows the demand peaking high for the week, not low.
Now I've been 3 days trying to get a response from tech support.
They deny responsibility, and promise to escalate it to a supervisor, then close the case without responding to my detailed evidence.
What can I do? Does anyone know how to escalate to an AirBNB IT person? I would have thought AirBNB would like to know its platform has a serious bug.
Outside of brand / name recognition I don’t know any reasons why someone would pick Airbnb over VRBO or another service.
Is there some sort of data play that they are making? Why would I invest in Airbnb when I could buy into a REIT or some other real estate asset? Would love some ellucidation.
I did some initial research on Airbnb vs. VRBO, and they do seem like very similar companies. However, VRBO started in 1995, while Airbnb started in 2008. VRBO had a head start, and yet has only 2 million listings in comparison to Airbnb's 7 million[0]. The faster growth of Airbnb in comparison to VRBO might be one reason you'd want to invest in Airbnb over VRBO, especially in an America that allows monopolies to thrive under certain conditions.
[0]: https://www.cnet.com/news/airbnb-vs-vrbo-which-is-the-best-v...
It's not really a problem from a financial perspective because law is lagging decades behind the real world and there's way too much money on the table for renters to care about the restrictions/bans (and there's almost zero enforcement of restrictions anyway).
Amazing growth and story up to 2018 (only $20M loss on $3.5B rev), clear investment in the marketing side that leads to the 2019 loss, but now curious if they can rebound when the world opens up.
Investing in Airbnb is definitely a bet on their model righting itself in a reasonable time frame. I wonder if their IPO price will have to reflect current realities instead of just future potential (given it probably won't improve its profitability for 2 years now)
I am sick of the random people being rude to me and the constant parties/noise. I can't do much about it. The bylaws of the building doesn't forbid it. I am trying to get elected to be part of the board so I can request these change to the bylaws.
I prefer to know my neighbours, might not be friends, but at least have some relation to them.
Laws, regulations, and rules that affect the short-term rental and home sharing business have limited and may continue to limit the ability or willingness of hosts to share their spaces over our platform and expose our hosts or us to significant penalties, which have had and could continue to have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations, and financial condition.
In most of the world Airbnb will not be able to buy a law like Uber/Lyft did with Prop 22 to get out of this jam.
> In September 2020, we received a Draft Notice of Proposed Adjustment from the IRS for the 2013 tax year proposing an increase to our U.S. taxable income that could result in additional income tax expense and cash tax liability of $1.35 billion, plus penalties and interest, which exceeds our current reserve recorded in our consolidated financial statements by more than $1.0 billion.
Any airbnb=er here wants to invest in a travel company? lol you never know..
Does the company have a legitimate business advantage that can establish market dominance?
How easy is it to replicate the business?Consumer trends - Who is using the product - young people vs older?
Revenue: Quarter over quarter increase? or a logical explanation if the rev is not growing.*Consumer comments: Do people like the company so much that they tell their friend about it?
Based on this, I think AirBnB is a winner all around. The company has developed a platform and a brand loyalty that has basically eliminated most competition in this space. In fact, their competitors are so small that most could not even name them.
From a technology standpoint, it is relatively easy to replicate but the branding and loyalty to AirBnB is unrivaled so this is what creates their moat. First-mover advantage is strong is this sector and it is clear AirBnb has gained the first-mover advantage by a wide margin.
Consumer trends - Young people love it. As these consumers get older, their income will increase and they will book more through AirBnB. The very young will most likely start off using AirBnB and never use hotels directly.
Revenue - Showing consistent growth prior to COVID-19. With COVID-19 apparently on the way to being vaccinated away the "COVID-19 slump" is not a concern for me. I could see vacation spending soaring once COVID-19 fears subsidies with consumers.
Consumer comments - People love AirBnB so much that they tell their friends about it. There are some issues with fraud but my guess is over time, AirBnB will figure out how to snuff these bad hosts out of their platform.
I think for the average user Chrome/Edge are pretty much interchangeable now. For advanced users it's pretty annoying but it's less than a second to switch off.