I really really love Airbnb, and I've mostly stayed at Airbnb and ignored hotel in the last 5 years perhaps. I now find hotels dirty, impersonal, and a chore to stay at to be honest.
Now, I've become increasingly irritated by Airbnb's pricing tactics. They are blatantly lying to you when it comes to how much you're going to pay.
I have two recent examples if you are not used to booking Airbnb:
* 99$/night room end up being 159$ for a night [1]
* 150$/night room end up being 500$ for two nights [2]
And these are not exceptions, but pretty much the norm nowadays. The final prices are ALWAYS way higher than what you would expect.
I feel the opposite and love hotels. If I wanted to clean up after myself like all my Airbnb hosts demand I’d just stay at home. I grew tired of all their demands (stripping all the beds before leaving, really?, washing all dishes, really?) and just started staying in hotels again and never looked back.
Seriously my first and only airbnb experience was a luxury house in Spain. He left a negative review because we didn't clean? What? He had a cleaner meet us and we paid a cleaning fee. We dropped all the towels by the washing machine. We were given no clear instructions. Who pays all this money to then worry about cleaning an entire house on holiday? I can't stand Airbnb and would rather use a specialist holiday rental agency dedicated to the area I'm headed to.
I hate airbnbs because they either charge $20 to send someone to pick your garbage or you have to haul garbage publicly and find a place to dump it. I understand it costs money but just build it into your daily rate and don't nickel and dime me for every silly request- additional towels- $5/pop, Early checkin- $50, late checkout- $100. As if all the flights in the world now fly you into and out of city between 11am and 4pm.
AirBnB clearly uses low room rates and high service fees to pull you in, but there's a legitimate reason to display it like that.
The cleaning fee is fixed. So maybe you start out thinking you'll stay 5 days, but end up staying 10. If they showed "all inclusive" rates you'd have confusion in the other direction. What you thought was the cheap hotel suddenly isn't because the cleaning fee for the two is very different.
Similarly, it's important to display the local taxes separately, because some customers may be e.g. entitled to a rebate for that part (some localities e.g. only charge foreigners).
>Similarly, it's important to display the local taxes separately, because some customers may be e.g. entitled to a rebate for that part (some localities e.g. only charge foreigners).
Yeah, and we can come up with a story of why a hefty AirBnB fee should be hidden until the last moment as well.
Or we can notice that 99.99% of AirBnB users aren't going to have their taxes and fees rebated, and would be better off seeing the total price right away.
Yes, including the cleaning fee.
The users enter specific days anyway. The rate changes depending on which days those are. You can't infer the price for another date range without getting a quote specifically for that date range anyway. Separating the cleaning fee out achieves nothing.
The legitimate reason is that momentum causes even frustrated and annoyed people to finish most transactions even after they realize that AirBNB has tricked them about the price. Let's not pretend there's something nobler then that.
The whole travel industry is chock full of this bullshit where vendors hide the full price (taxes, resort fees, etc.). It sucks.
Working for an OTA for the last 5 years I can confirm this. Also, stay away from travel insurance, cancellation protection, or whatever else they call it. It's a scam.
And yes, as a previous user stated, it's very easy for us developers to include the fees and taxes in the average rate display. Fees are either fixed dollar amounts or a percentage of the room charge. It's trivial to add this into the average rate per night. Our corporate overlords instruct/force us not to.
Furthermore, my advice is to avoid the major OTAs such as Expedia. First, they engage in price-fixing. Hotels are not allowed to display prices cheaper than they appear in Expedia, otherwise they are threatened with delisting. Expedia calls this their "rate parity" policy. They should be taken to court by the DOJ. Second, they take a massive percentage from hotels as commission. Use Expedia to find availability, but then go direct to the hotel. Also, because hotels know they are getting absolutely FUCKED by Expedia. They will not put inventory on Expedia during peak seasons. They know they can get max occupancy without being charged a 30% by Expedia. Ski resort hotels are a prime example, but there are several other cases. In short fuck Expedia and probably AirBnB too.
Rate parity isn't price fixing, and it's been going on for decades (pre-dates the Internet). The DOJ and EU regulators know about it.
The hotel can price rooms however they want, they then enter into a voluntary contract with an OTA to give them a percent.
If hotels could just consistently give consumers OTA prices minus that percentage directly customers would get savvy to that, and the legitimate service an OTA provides wouldn't be paid for.
It would just lead to shadier forms of advertising for the same service, like the OTA obscuring the name, location etc. of the hotel.
Maybe that'll happen, and maybe we'll be better off as a society. It'll impact a lot more than just OTA's, e.g. Google Adwords displaying a product for $100 when part of that margin is being given to Google.
> Second, they take a massive percentage from hotels as commission. Use Expedia to find availability, but then go direct to the hotel[...]
30% is very high, but if the hotel is voluntarily paying a 30% rate on advertisement that's how much it's worth to them.
Whether that's "fair" or not it's generally a bad deal for the consumer to book directly at the same rate, if something goes sideways they don't have the OTA's bargaining power to help them out.
> They will not put inventory on Expedia during peak seasons.
Good for them, but it seems 30% is worth it in the off-season if they go out of their way to sign-up to pay that.
> In short fuck Expedia and probably AirBnB too.
A hotel that's willing to pay Expedia 30% on X for ads isn't going to be better off with no X at all, which unless they're idiots is the alternative.
You're basically saying "fuck advertisement". Sellers stand to gain from advertising their services to buyers, that's why advertising exists.
"Voluntary" give me a break. Do you actually believe what you're typing? If so, that is an impressive spell you've placed yourself under. The large OTAs have such a large share of the market that there is nothing voluntary about using them. It's list your hotel with us or go out of business. And when you have that clout, you can then say, and don't try listing prices on your website that are lower than ours or we will de-list you.
Explain how that is not price-fixing at worst, and not shady at best?
I didn't mean to ignore this, I just wasn't following the thread, and perhaps you won't see this reply.
I'm not maintaining that the current status quo is optimal, just that it's more complex than what people traditionally think of as price fixing, which e.g. would be all the gas stations in your area deciding to charge you the same for gas via explicit collusion.
Speaking more generally, the travel industry as a whole has always and probably always will spend a relatively large amount of advertising of some sort. Most of the industry is hoping to lure travelers with no local knowledge to their properties or services, and they're competing with other local properties.
Before OTAs hotels might expect to pay this advertising fee to travel agencies, or to pay to be part of a hotel chain as a guaranteed source of customers.
The unstated desire of people opposed to rate parity is to somehow have their cake and eat it too.
After all, if almost nobody looked at these OTA websites why care about it? It's not going to have much of a financial impact.
But they do care, because OTA's are a major source of revenue. And why is that? Because people get a lot of value from those sorts of market intermediaries, not just in the accommodation business, but in the form of major chain stores, Amazon, eBay etc. It's easier to compare products when you have a standardized comparison run by an intermediary.
As far as I can tell the scenario hotels hoping for the end of rate parity want is one where consumers might browse OTA websites, but be savvy enough to just visit the hotel's website directly to make a booking.
I don't see how that's going to be sustainable, you'd essentially have advertising with a free rider problem. Ending it wouldn't be the end of the world, but I don't see how we wouldn't just end up in some new equilibrium where accommodations wouldn't just pay a similar amount of money for advertising via some other means.
It's not like browsing organic Google results for hotels is some arcane wizardry, or visiting a town's listing of hotels (which the hotels generally don't pay for or get at really good rates) isn't known to people.
Yes these lingering discussions tend to get buried. I'm actually surprised you responded given the nature of HN. I'm surprised I decided to check my comment history as well.
We disagree. I view rate parity as a form of price-fixing. I don't doubt the value OTAs provide to the consumer, but their value isn't sufficient enough to stand on its own without price fixing. Expedia knows this, and therefor uses its market position to fix prices and thus maintain is position. When challenged, which it has been numerous times, its legal team has been effective in arguing their point. I can't deny that. Perhaps my view is overly simplistic. I view someone telling me, if you want to sell your product on my site you have to sell it for the same price everywhere as price-fixing. Yes, its voluntary, but in practical terms its not because the hotel cannot survive without the OTAs. I won't weep too many tears, because the hotels could use their sufficient capital to address the problem. But, lets at least call a spade a spade here. If it looks, walks, and quacks. Well...
You brought up Amazon as an example of market indermediaries, otherwise known as middlemen. Are they engaging in price-fixing? What about ebay, are they engaging in price fixing? I'm actually interested if we can find a similar example to what OTAs do in another industry. I don't think we can.
The product I work on has a search experience similar to Airbnb's. We initially made the choice to show all-in prices on the initial search screens. Bookings TANKED. Guests called in to complain why our listings are "more expensive on our own site than Airbnb" (they were cheaper at the end of the day, but we weren't hiding fees).
End of the day, we had to switch to Airbnb's fee-hiding style because users are trained to expect the hidden fees.
A junior-level developer could do this. You don't need any serious brainpower to pull this off. They have all the pricing already. They omit the fees purposefully.
Source: I've worked as a Sr. Engineer at an OTA for the last 5 years.
I'm not sure, but this might fall into the category of "dark patterns".
It's the same as Lyft and Uber giving you a "wait" estimate that almost always ends up being longer, but if the expected wait seems to be shorter, you are more likely to book the car and wait for it to show up.
Similarly, you are more likely to book the room/house/apartment on AirBnB if the price shown is lower than the final price.
Bad behavior. But everybody does this, one way or another.
I've found this annoying, but they always show you the total on the initial booking listing (if you've specified the dates and number of people). You know upfront what you're going to pay; there's no bait and switch. It makes searching by nightly price a little more tedious than it should be (search by total would be nice), but I've never felt deceived.
Yeah, it's the same reason tipping exists, and resort fees exist. They do it because it helps them make more money by tricking people into thinking it's cheaper than what it actually is.
Pretty sure Airbnb has A/B test results somewhere to back that up.
It always shows average prices to me when I insert people and dates, so it probably behaves differently according to users/markets or it does a/b testing.
Lately the service really became horrible: Last minute cancellation, soulless places run like an industry. prices on the same level or even more expensive than hotels.
Customer support is also completely unresponsive.
I'm now going back to hotels 90% of the times where I can expect a consistent quality of services.
They grew too fast and got arrogant in the process. I hope they quietly go away and get replaced by a company that does this correctly. I heard only good things about HomeAway lately
Another really annoying thing about the app is that they’ve seemingly increased the number of clicks/steps to complete a simple search for a place because they’re heavily pushing “experiences.” Very irritating
> Lately the service really became horrible: Last minute cancellation, soulless places run like an industry. prices on the same level or even more expensive than hotels. Customer support is also completely unresponsive.
This has generally been my experience. It's very hit-or-miss, and some places were fantastic... but others weren't. I got jerked around a lot and ended up paying rates roughly on par with local hotels.
At least with the big name chain hotels I can generally predict what I'm going to get, what it will cost me, and I can easily harangue, bitch, complain, and possibly sue the actual chain. AirBnB makes it harder to seek a resolution, if needed.
Don’t bother with Vacasa. Same story. Arrogant and expensive. Cashing in on tech startup hype while looking to buy up as much real property as possible to sit on.
After I experienced a couple bad bookings I found out about:
airbnbhell.com
It's full of horror stories from both owners and renters. And the gist seems to be: once Airbnb has your money (fee) they really couldn't care less about what happens.
I recently stopped using them after they asked to send in facsimiles of government ID to continue using their services (after being a customer with all 5 star reports over many years).
Something I've long wondered about in Airbnb's communication platform and guarding their earnings: When a host answers a customer and attempts to put a phone number, an email address, a URL, the word "craigslist", or spelling out a number like three six seven..., it gets replaced by "(HIDDEN FOR YOUR PROTECTION)".
The frustration at that point leads one to suspect that it's actually hidden to prevent anything that could lead to transactions outside of the platform, where Airbnb would be unable to take their cut.
If there does turn out to be a means to establish contact, and a rental then happens outside of Airbnb's systems, do the terms of service actually restrict this? It just seems strange to me at the outset. As far as I know Amazon sellers aren't prohibited from also selling off-Amazon, but maybe housing and other industries have some conventions that are comparable?
While certainly it’s in Airbnb’s financial interests to keep transactions on platform, I saw a great deal of cases where fraudulent hosts (with fake listings) were encouraging folks to make off platform payments. Of course the first thing most guests do in those cases is complain to Airbnb and demand their money back — as if Airbnb had taken their money. Putting some friction helps Airbnb say, “We’re sorry that happened, but that’s not our problem.”
On the surface, I agree this is a strange PR tactic that hasn't been followed by any private company I can think of recently .
I think it's entirely possible that they are doing this because they expect to have to deal with whatever legal/regulatory issues they face around the world that have been in a grey area since they started and this is basically an invitation to regulators to do something now so that regulatory risks won't be perceived to be this massive red flag to investors as they shop the IPO around.
I'd for sure argue that regulation is Airbnb's greatest existential threat, especially at a time when we're all acutely aware of how expensive housing has become in urban centers where Airbnb makes most of their money.
IPO are basically a big-ass roadshow - you need to drum up excitement with institutional investors so they start salivating at the possible money they can make.
This does seem early, but I’m sure there is some rationale to stay on the big bank’s radar screens and have them knocking down Airbnb’s door to be the lead bank on this deal.
I’m sure someone from investment banking will be along to add some color.
I am a big time traveler. When AirBnB appeared on the scene, it was a life changing event for me. So much better then hotels.
Since then, AirBnB have not added anything that benefits me. But booking.com have catched up massively. To the point that I prefer booking.com again these days. I would have never expected that to happen.
Some of my pet peeves with AirBnB:
AirBnB's reviews are not chronological. So you have to read them all to make sure you do not miss recent complaints.
AirBnB does not show the exact location of the apartments.
AirBnB sometimes removes negative reviews for no good reason.
AirBnB lets hosts get away with removing their listing (due to negative reviews) and relist them with a clean slate.
I really hope AirBnB will stay strong. A healthy competition between them and booking.com is probably best for travelers.
By the way, anybody here using something other then AirBnB or booking.com? Would love to hear if there are other good options to consider.
I feel the same way. Some of my fondest travel memories are staying in airbnbs.
But in the past few years, at a seemingly accelerating pace, what an airbnb is has changed.
In the last few years when I've used them, not all but almost all of them have simply been unlicensed hotels run by investor-landlords who aren't present and at best will pay someone else to come meet you with a key, but usually just leave it in a lock box.
Everything feels cheap, and sketchy. There is no personality. You're not meeting anyone, getting local knowledge, living with a local. On the contrary, you're sometimes sharing the same apartment with other tourists.
If I don't get any of the good sides, all I'm left with is the downsides - unpredictability, suspicion from other residents in the building, the plethora of random ways things can go wrong when your host isn't available to help you out 24/7.
I'd honestly rather just pay the extra 20% or so for a basic hotel room to get the same thing but without those downsides. Booking.com or Hotels.com are now the places I go first, before Airbnb.
I'm not at all sure that Airbnb care about this to be honest. They obviously must be aware of it, yet it continues getting more like that, not less. I guess the growth and the numbers from running a cheap unlicensed hotel rooms service is just better than they could get from their original vision. Wish them well, but also wish the old Airbnb was back!
The problem is the old airbnb that you describe would probably cap at a few billion $ market cap. The one with investor-landlords optimizing everything and squeezing out every last bit of profit gets airbnb closer to that juicy $35B exit that their investors are looking for.
Oh I agree, sure. Actually put that in the last paragraph. I don't blame them, business is business, and perhaps there's an argument that the growth enables the marketplace to exist at all because otherwise it wouldn't large enough to be self-sustaining. Perhaps the earlier model just wasn't, was subsidised by VC money, they realised that and just pushed on with what could work.
I've listened to a few podcasts from years ago with the founders and you can hear the excitement in their voices talking about the early vision and what it could be. And it was like that, years ago. It had its own problems, but it really was something truly great that wasn't really easily accessible before at any kind of scale.
I just imagine the founders coming with me to some of the places I've ended up staying, and imagining what they'd think, how disappointed they'd be at what it's become. How different it is from their original vision. They're probably not disappointed with how their business is doing, but for sure, the vision has evaporated along the way to enable this.
In some ways I actually prefer the cheap-investor Airbnb experience.
I recently stayed with a very kind lady at a low rate. I didn’t dislike her at all but I was staying in her house with her and it was just an odd experience for me.
Usually when I get an Airbnb it’s because I know the hotels/motels in the area are a racket and I want somewhere that is cheaper, bigger, and in a better location than the hotels. It’s especially useful and cheap when traveling in a group of 3+. I actually would prefer not to stay with a host who is present because it gives me anxiety.
I feel the same way as you, but Airbnb lets you filter for this when searching ("whole apartment", "one room", etc.). I've been in one where the owner lived in a different apartment upstairs, but there was no sound travel or anything.
The weird cheap investor units I've been in never had the owner around, but there was a lot of noise leakage between guests in different units because the units were low-quality industrial "pods" retrofitted into some warehouse space or something.
In the touristy parts of colorado, hotels and formal condo rentals are pretty much cheaper across the board than AirBnb this year, and it's primarily due to cleaning (followed by service) fees that are often double the cost of a 1- or 2-base night rate that is already often more expensive than the nightly of a hotel. It reminds of purchasing things on eBay back in the 2000s, where the shipping cost would be triple the purchase cost.
How many of these pet peeves are held by the average AirBnB user?
I would guess "none". These are the kinds of complaints that "power users" have because they use websites like tools. Average users don't. My mother would look at the first three reviews and consider that in-depth research. The next time she uses AirBnB, she won't notice re-listings, or removed reviews.
In short, I don't think these kinds of issues are going to hurt their business.
You're probably right about that. I think the average consumer also has fairly low tolerance for mishaps with novel experiences. If they have a bad time in the first one or two stays, the next discussion at Thanksgiving dinner will be about how Airbnb is dangerous and they much prefer hotels and others should too lest they put themselves at risk.
I usually read the description and judge the personality of the host based on that; I stayed with some fantastic hosts recently, and when they asked me why I booked (it was their first), I told them: great, personal description.
Had worked for me as a good filter in addition to reviews.
It didn't seem like the OP was making any kind of claim about those pet peeves being held by an average AirBnB user. In any case, it seems like a bold strategy to fight anecdata with anecdata. To that end, it doesn't look like booking.com has had any noticeable difference in google trends relative to AirBnB.
I almost always prefer hotels over AirBnB-style accomodations, but when I do want a house or something, I use VRBO rather than AirBnB. At least within the US, I find it more to my liking both in terms of booking experience and quality/selection of properties. No idea how it compares outside the US, as I always book hotels when traveling abroad.
> To the point that I prefer booking.com again these days. I would have never expected that to happen.
Interesting. A friend and I were looking for places this weekend and I kept posting airbnb listings, while he kept posting booking.com ones. I absolutely can't stand booking.com's website and we ended up with an airbnb one.
I can't recall many listings I avoided because of reviews. I might just be lucky, but pictures and words usually match reality
> By the way, anybody here using something other then AirBnB or booking.com? Would love to hear if there are other good options to consider.
I usually go with hostelworld.com. I was a bit anxious in the beginning but in the last 3 years I've stayed in more than a dozen hostels and overall had a good experience. For example, there are two lovely small hostels in the Bay Area, one in Marin Headlands and one in Pigeon Point.
I think 2020 misses the window to strike when the IPO market is bubbly. Lyft and Uber timed it just right -- and those won't be the only four-letter words their investors will be screaming!
What exactly is the roadmap for Airbnb? They stays feature seems to have maxed out in listings and declining now that random people are trying to manage 15+ listings in many cities. I often see the same listings on Booking for cheaper too.
All the other features I don't even look at because I'm not interested in an 'adventure' given by some random guy with no professional experience.
Honestly surprised they haven't expanded at all within the stays experience.
Airbnb has the benefit of a much better UI and UX compared to several over hotel aggregators like booking.com or expedia, or even domestic ones here in Japan like rakuten or jalan.
The only thing that annoys me the Airbnb booking experience, is that it's not really a booking, it's putting in a booking request and then waiting for the owners to approve. Compared to regular hotels.
I used Airbnb for the first time a few months ago, and I was surprised they were able to stay in business with the current interface.
I the prices kept changing at different views, I couldnt save a search, even active searches would just go away if i tapped back, they pushed me to link to a third party auth, but when I did they created a separate account and i could no longer reach the one that had my reservations. It was a mess all the way around.
The only thing I did like was all the weird places to stay.
> Airbnb has the benefit of a much better UI and UX compared to several over hotel aggregators like booking.com
While AirBnB might be pleasing on the eyes, Booking's UI is optimised for conversion. The benefit of "better UI and UX" is arguable here if it does not result in more $ for the business. Specially if they want to compete in the public market.
I genuinely like Booking.com's interface. I've learned to read the dark patterns so I don't get forced into a bad deal. But once you go past that, they offer all the information you actually need to make a decision
The fact that you feel the need to mention that "I've learned to read the dark patterns" speaks volumes about booking.com. And not in a positive sense.
It gets the job done. But maybe that's not the UX itself but Booking.com's usual "no payment, free cancellation" deals. I often just find a hotel that looks okay and book it straight away. I check out the reviews later and cancel if something doesn't look right.
My point about how do we define "benefit of UI and UX"? If the criteria is conversion/revenue/profit - as arguably it should be for a publicly trading business - Booking and Expedia are no slouches.
> The only thing that annoys me the Airbnb booking experience, is that it's not really a booking, it's putting in a booking request and then waiting for the owners to approve. Compared to regular hotels.
Regular hotels might not always be a live booking either. Every once in a while, someone misses a fax. Usually a real hotel has some slack to fix things when some one comes in with a reservation that didn't get booked.
One thing they may have in the pipe is to have regular short term rental market places like Booking.com to list Airbnb rentals as well. Basically expand the reach outside of their own website.
Having more than one kids gives Airbnb an edge over most hotels in the price per person category.
The normal pricing range in hotels is 2 beds are normally priced (a small kids is optionally included) but anything more than that requires more rooms or a suite.
At Airbnb the price per person becomes much more reasonable, and that's before the ability to find the kids something to do since most places have TVs, a streamer and some game stuff.
I was heavy Airbnb, I'm now 50/50. If traveling solo I prefer hostels, they are cheaper and I get to meet people from all walks of life. Some of the best experiences of my life have come from being in a hostel. I once nabbed a cheap ticket to Tomorrow Land while at a hostel in Belgium, the person's friend couldn't make it. That's just one of many.
Wouldn't an impending recession be particularly impactful on their business? I mean, if I had to buy stock now with knowledge that an impending down market is guaranteed I don't think it would be in the hospitality industry, unless I overestimate how much that industry is influenced by recessions.
VC companies themselves raise money from investors to create a fund, which is then used to invest in startups. Generally, funds are raised with a specific timeline pitch for returns to the investors - often 7-10 years. In order to return money to investors, the investments in the fund have to actually pay money back to the VC firm - the best way to do this is via IPO (although acquisition is also an option).
Due to overall market conditions, a glut of investment happened in the VC space 7-8 years ago (i.e. a bunch of funds were started), and those funds now need to get money back to the investors to prove a nice ROI, so there's a push to get the startups that were funded by the fund to exit one way or another.
When a VC raises a fund, they usually try to return the money in 7~10 years after they start deploying the capital to startups. In other words, they want to exit their position no later than 10 years and usually shoot for 5~7.
Not that dude but ~11 years ago was the recession so I'm guessing he's alluding to the fact that lots of investment money comes out of hibernation all at once when recessions begin to recede.
Look, say what you want, but nearly everyone in the finance community (public equities, private equity, etc) knows this is coming. You're right, it's impossible to know when exactly, but there's hardly any doubt it's coming soonTM.
But everyone in the finance community has been saying that loudly since mid 2017 when we reached an 8 year bull market. As they say, economists have predicted 12 of the last 5 recessions.
Late stage funding options are drying up big time. See Uber, Lyft, WeWork, and Softbank. These companies are still burning cash at high rates, so going to the public markets is the only option to raise that much capital.
This will most likely be a direct listing because Airbnb doesn't need to raise more capital. Its actually about employee liquidity for people waiting 10+ years.
The source is Airbnb themselves saying they have been EBITDA profitable for 2 years now - which is a very strong and verifiable claim for once they do go public.
There have been articles since at least mid 2018 talking about how Airbnb doesn’t need additional money and how it was taking steps to prepare for going public before early employee equity grants expired in 2020. After they reworked how they gave employees equity that summer and promised to be IPO ready by mid 2019 to assuage employees, many publications ran articles about it.
Airbnb’s last funding round was in the first months of 2017, over two years ago. There is a straightforward explanation for that. Airbnb makes money. It is that rare thing; a profitable tech company. That means it doesn’t have to run to become public quite as eagerly as other companies. Its growth can be funded by the money it takes in itself.
...
Getting access to capital from a vast pool of investors is one of the main reasons companies go public. Supporting an IPO is a time consuming and expensive affair. Since Airbnb doesn’t need as much money for research and development or expanding its market, there is less incentive to IPO.
...
There is one excellent reason that Airbnb will go public in 2020, though. That’s when some shares promised to employees will expire — meaning they won’t be able to reap the financial rewards that come with growing a company.
Literally google “Airbnb direct listing” and you can see top analysts talking about it for years. Just like they said Spotify would do a direct listing and then they did. Just like they said Slack would do a direct listing and then they did.
Airbnb is actually profitable (at least EBITDA) unlike these other companies and hasn’t raised a major round in a while since they don’t need capital. This makes them a much better direct listing candidate than those previous companies.
It was widely reported they met with Morgan Stanley about a direct listing and Morgan Stanley is considered the expert in the field since they managed the last few.
“In a short statement posted on its website on Thursday, Airbnb did not give any details on how it plans to list its shares, although it is widely expected to take a direct-listing route.
A direct listing to go public is a process in which no new shares are created and helps companies save millions of dollars in underwriting fees.”
So why can’t I know what is widely reported to media by company insiders and has been for years?
If everyone thinks there's going to be a recession, wouldn't that mean that would be priced into the IPO price? ie. if you think that there's going to be a recession in 3 months, you wouldn't plow a boatload of money into an IPO.
High information investors and executives know an impending recession is probable, but low information investors will still happily plow money into IPOs.
Predicting the exact timing of a recession is very hard to do. You can say there are troubling signs but I would be extremely skeptical of somebody telling me "Winter/2020" with a high degree of confidence. Meanwhile, there have been people pointing out troubling signs for several years now, and if you acted on their advice you'd have lost money, but nobody could have told you that for sure at the time, either.
A direct listing is definitely not the most likely option. Only two major tech companies have done direct listings and there are also a lot more reasons you would want to do an IPO instead of a direct listing
1) Neither SPOT or WORK has done great, especially WORK
2) IPO allows you to choose your investors. This gives you the opportunity to choose major institutional investors that are in for the long term which will help reduce stock volatility.
3) Even if you don't need money, raising billions can open up a lot of opportunities for the business and give you a warchest to derisk potential market downturns.
“In a short statement posted on its website on Thursday, Airbnb did not give any details on how it plans to list its shares, although it is widely expected to take a direct-listing route.”
A direct listing is definitely the most likely option which is why they didn’t call it an IPO anywhere. They already have huge numbers of institutional and strategic investors. I’m not sure who you think they are waiting to get investment from. Crunchbase lists 53 investors including YC, Sequoia, Andreesen Horowitz, Greylock, Founder’s Fund, CapitalG, and TCV. They turned down SoftBank funding. Their shares have been owned by mutual funds from Vanguard, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, Principal, T. Rowe Price, and Hartford for at least five years. They’ve already raised the warchest that you’re talking about.
Spotify and Slack had fine initial listings, but they are both losing tons of money so the market reacted negatively as their quarterly earnings made this more and more clear. Not a great comparison to a company that has been printing money and hasn’t raised a serious round in years.
We've been using AirBnB's for maybe 95% of our vacation stays since 2016. I think many of the comments here are spot on w/r to weird fees and semi-pro "hoteliers" with multiple properties and so on. Some thoughts from staying at a few dozen different places all over the world:
- The quality of places we've gotten in the U.S. has in general been lower and not entirely matching the description. With a couple exceptions, the U.S. AirBnB's have definitely been...not great. But we feel pressured to leave good reviews so that the host leaves us good counter review so that other hosts will make sure to book us.
- Outside of the U.S., the experience has been almost universally great. Better on average than hotels for the same price. Bigger, better locations, better prices, and so on.
- We've definitely moved from "spare room" to "entire place" and been much happier and less awkward feeling for everybody involved. However, some of the more memorably places have been meeting people in the places we stay.
- Some of the nicest places we've stayed were flats in Europe where the owner has taken a job in some other country and rents their place out on AirBnB. There was a particularly fantastic 6 days in Vienna in a two bedroom flat with a full kitchen, clothes washer, free parking, and a fully furnished living room, a 5 minute walk from the tram and a short 15 minute ride to the city center under $65 a night...absolutely insane.
- We've definitely stayed at places where we were instructed to say "we're friends of so and so". It felt weird, but we've never had a problem and we try to be particularly quiet and respectful of the community we're staying in. Still, it needs to be worked out and I can definitely see the side of other people who live in the building not liking it.
- I'm aware that AirBnB is not helping anybody's housing costs. On the flip side it definitely seems to be revitalizing some other housing markets in interesting neighborhoods. One enterprising place we stayed in Budapest was slowly being bought, renovated and flipped a flat at a time and some locals mentioned that the neighborhood has gone from run down to revitalized with all the new foot traffic coming from a couple buildings that were going through the same strategy.
- I think Japan is the closest to regulating it correctly. They've basically said, "if you want to run an AirBnB, it's fine, but you are now a limited use hotel." Of the half dozen places we've stayed in Japan, every single one followed the new law 100% and it wasn't a huge fuss. It honestly made it more comfortable to stay in since we didn't feel like usurpers as much. Bonus, every place we stayed in was also correctly outfitted with emergency exit signs and other "hotel safety things" like fire extinguishers and so on. They can only rent out their apartments for so many days-per-year which also helps with some of the property speculation bits I think.
- We've stayed at a couple places in economically depressed communities and it was very clear that the AirBnB was a very unique economic opportunity for the owners that was bringing in much needed income that they really didn't have access to in any other way. Very memorable, positive, stays in those cases because we felt we were doing a little bit of good.
As Airbnb is getting banned across cities in Europe and locals are beginning to hate on it + staled growth it's about the time to hand the equity over to public investors and cash out.
I'm not very bullish on Airbnb, I used to practically live in Airbnb for over 3 years, but for the last 2 years I haven't even logged in and been only using booking.com.
I remember years back in London an Airbnb host that wasn't even the owner of the apartment but a tenant herself told me while moving in "tell everyone you're a friend, it's not allowed in this building but everyone's doing it"
Now landlords and building owners are catching up and most new developments are forbidding this contractually, while others do what they can to prevent their neighbours from letting to strangers.
I'm probably missing something, but I think the company is going down and they're pulling an exit scam.
>tell everyone you're a friend, it's not allowed in this building but everyone's doing it" .
I had the same bullshit happen to me a month ago in Hawaii.
More specifically the owner waited for the period where I can cancel to be over before demanding that (among other rules which were reasonable).
When I did not answer his message (I was considering my options, I have no intention to lie for a stranger), he contacted airbnb support who contacted me.
I explained that asking me to lie for him was ridiculous and I that I was ok with a full cancellation. The airbnb support then pressured me to keep the reservation.
The vacation was awesome but this place was pretty meh.
The same kind of issues happened later in Los Angeles.
That's just anecdotal, but I feel that the quality of the experience on Airbnb has really worsened for me in the past 1 or 2 years.
Too many people that (poorly) operate multiple airbnbs at the same time.
As far as I am concerned, hotels are back as my plan A. The prices are comparable with Airbnb in most cases and the experience is WAY less of a headache (no need to search for the keys for 2 hours because the owner tries to hide that there is an airbnb there ...).
> I'm probably missing something, but I think the company is going down and they're pulling an exit scam.
AirBnB is doing fine. They've posted healthy profits for the past few years, which is more than can be said of nearly every other tech/startup company that has announced an IPO recently (Uber, Lyft, Pelaton, WeWork, Cloudflare, Slack, Postmates, and Pinterest are all unprofitable).
Right. They are doing so well that many analysts expect them to do a direct listing which means they won't even be selling any shares in the public listing.
They raised billions and now they make more money every quarter so there is no reason to raise more money unless there are specific larger acquisitions or expansions that can't be self-funded.
Revenue is a better thermometer than profits here, especially since most startups leading up to an IPO manipulate their profits into looking great.
It seems the regulatory product lifecycle is that AirBnB enters a new market, and then some time later that market starts to regulate and restrict it. How many new markets does AirBnB have left to exploit regulation?
> most startups leading up to an IPO manipulate their profits into looking great.
They're clearly not - or if so, they're doing a pretty bad job at it, because most big-name tech startups that have announced IPOs have posted a track record of losses, not profits.
That’s not actually true. A certain real estate leasing firm could give away the first year on a three year commitment to book the revenue at a very high COGS, allowing for unsustainable revenue growth. The internet 1.0 had many great examples of this.
True, but I didn't mean to say revenue was completely immune to the same manipulation - Microsoft was notorious for deferring windows revenue to show QoQ growth stability in the 90's, like you're eluding to. Still, there are fewer levers to manipulate revenue than profits, and I'd have more faith in that for AirBnB than profits.
Well, I think in We's case, they are pulling revenue which should be deferred forward, but like the Dotcom companies, you can also grow revenue by selling $2 for $1, which shows up when your losses are growing more/close to your revenue growth.
As you mentioned, net income can easily be massaged, adjusted EBITDA, etc. Cash flow is harder to fake. Airbnb should have decent to good unit economics though.
They did post a healthy profit or rather shared earnings before tax with the media. But if there is no further growth potential such profits make the company worth way less than the most recent valuation even by NASDAQ standards which has inflated P/E.
Even if that profit was after tax and amortization, etc. (which it wasn't) it's a tiny fraction of what booking.com makes while Airbnb is still charging higher fees.
I don't think it's ridiculous statement considering their profits are rather fragile as that's before regulation and the size of the last years earnings equals about half the current valuation by NASDAQ's median P/E.
“profits are rather fragile” != “exit scam”. I think you just don’t know what this term means. An exit scam is where an established business keeps taking orders, but stops delivering product and pockets the difference. It’s also sometimes used (especially in cryptocurrency) when someone takes all the held funds and runs off. Do you really believe Airbnb’s IPO meets either of these criteria? They’re going to keep delivering services, and I really doubt the founders are going to empty the bank accounts and run off.
Well, let's say I use the term "loosely" ... I believe they're going to go bust in the coming years with coming regulation and shrinking market and there is no more growth of principal for the shareholders, in fact it's overvalued. To successfully dump it on retail, you need a "story" and a good marketing and presenting the stock as something that it's not in this case, and I think people involved are aware of it.
> We have experienced net losses in each year since our inception. In the years ended December 31, 2014, 2015 and 2016, we incurred net losses of $(30.8) million, $(47.0) million and $(54.9) million, respectively.
Can relate. I used to use AirBNB exclusively. I hated hotels with a passion. Maybe I just got older. Maybe Booking.com got a lot better. Maybe AirBNB got worse. I'm not sure what it is, but now AirBNB is always my last resort.
Same. Agoda, Booking, Kayak and hotels are my place now. It isn't the same anymore. What airbnb was in 2013-2014 was magical.
Now, with 300+ reviews, it's, sad, and maybe I was part of the change because I rented places and lived 50/50 in different parts of the world and it was possible w/ airbnb and I only tried to be cost negative.
> It isn't the same anymore. What airbnb was in 2013-2014 was magical.
I'm a host (a single "entire" house) and started in 2015, which in Australia was early-ish.
As host it's getting hard and thankless. Supply is driving prices down (about $40 a night less than a year ago) and vacancy is higher too. Guests are more than likely new or only have 1 or 2 reviews, and are not the early adopters looking for something different, they are people looking for cheap and easy accommodation (where easy means no responsibilities).
The review process is painful and hosts live constantly in fear of guests that leave glowing reviews, 5 stars for each category but 4 stars overall -- overall is the only rating that counts. Remember that hosts need an average of 4.7 to remain on the platform, so a couple of 4-star reviews can be devastating.
The other thing is that Airbnb keeps dictating terms for hosts. Children and infants are free!
Not so much recession but the window in which non-tech companies can “techwash” for IPOs is rapidly closing if the WeWork fiasco hasn’t slammed it shut already
Seems like a good time to cash out. I don't know where the growth is going to come from at this point.
Major cities have recognized the negative externalities that Airbnb has on rental vacancy and land values, and are starting to add on regulations of various strength. That will drag on growth.
The company gained its valuation from days past when people were buying new condos exclusively to rent 100% of the time on Airbnb, and cities are banning that sort of behaviour.
> negative externalities that Airbnb has on rental vacancy and land values
Is that an externality of AirBnB or poor city planning? Cities are eager to build offices and advertise to attract tourists, but convince themselves they don't need more residential construction. Fixing the underlying cause will work better than banning the symptom.
> Is that an externality of AirBnB or poor city planning?
I'd say both. Poor city planning leads to it happening, but AirBnB exacerbates the problem. And for a politician, regulating AirBnB is much easier and a lot more understandable by the electorate.
Explaining how they should be reelected because of changes they made to fundamental housing policy that will take 30 years to materialize is a hard sell.
It doesn't take 30 years to build new homes. As soon as California forced cities to allow ADUs they were built in large numbers. Add duplexes, three plexes, etc and we'll get even more.
The thing about regulating symptoms is that it's cathartic without accomplishing much.
It doesn't take 30 years to build, but it takes 30 years for enough people to sell land and enough builders to buy land and then build to make any difference.
I was reading an article about a city that was upzoned in the 70s which I can't find now, but the gist of it was that everyone was worried the upzoning would change everything. In reality, in the 40 years since, only a few single family homes were torn down and replaced with multi-unit dwellings. Most of the land sales were still from one single family owner to another.
I think I read the same article (Portland?). The key thing is that the change was slow because demand was building up slowly.
OTOH, if changes are held back for decades and demand is pent up (ie soaring prices and increasing commutes) then there's going to be a surge once changes are allowed. ie SF will see a far bigger, faster change than other places.
It's precisely the places that have a huge pent up demand for housing that have the biggest problem with Airbnb.
Busy-body, most likely racist, neighbors get upset that there are people who aren't rich enough living in their fancy pants neighborhood.
Alternatively, jealous neighbors are upset that someone has more money than them and are convinced that it must be because the tenant is basically hitler.
Tangential to the topic, but does AirBnB operate under any regulations? When I was in Seattle, my apartment building ended up adding an explicit clause in the lease saying you couldn’t rent a property and turn it around into an AirBnB or any kind of room share for temporary or short term stays.
The legal framework wasn’t there (this is 2016 I’m describing), and so I wonder why go public now. Get a more solid footing and then lobby for regulation to drown out other start ups?
There are many towns in the Rocky Mountains whose populations are around 600 people and whose primary industry is tourism. 1/3 doesn't sound high for places like that at all.
A very touristy city near me offers a fixed number of permits to property owners to offer short-term rentals out of their non-primary residences homes, and somewhat recently increased the number of permits they hand out.
Some places are banning operations like airbnb, and others are embracing them with the aim of controlling the downsides.
Apartment owners in general don't like to allow subletting or renting because it makes things like liability and property insurance claims tricky if anything should go wrong, and people tend to like neighbors more than they do strangers walking around outside their door.
NYC, one of Airbnb's biggest markets, has been cracking down hard on illegal short-term rentals. Bloomberg has an article today about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21015849
I live in Vancouver (BC) and over here Airbnb worked with city to create and enforce regulation for short term rentals (ie, requiring a license to operate and then actually policing and enforcing the regulations). I think its working out well an expect to see this model being applied in other cities as well.
AirBnBs are generally subject to hoteling regulations in every market that has them.
AirBnB, as the booking agent for the hosts, doesn't get to ignore the regulations just because the host is liable for any violations. Because they're acting as an agent for the hosts, they're also bound by those regulations.
(AirBnB has claimed they are just a "platform" for connecting hosts and guests. But they handle too much of the transaction for both sides to just be a "platform"--they also handle payment, refunds, customer service, etc. Also, there's generally no such thing as a "platform" exception with respect to hoteling laws.)
Now, I've become increasingly irritated by Airbnb's pricing tactics. They are blatantly lying to you when it comes to how much you're going to pay.
I have two recent examples if you are not used to booking Airbnb:
* 99$/night room end up being 159$ for a night [1]
* 150$/night room end up being 500$ for two nights [2]
And these are not exceptions, but pretty much the norm nowadays. The final prices are ALWAYS way higher than what you would expect.
[1]: https://twitter.com/cryptodavidw/status/1173775045606301696
[2]: https://twitter.com/cryptodavidw/status/1159574818661867520
On a tighter budget (50-150$) I always prefer airbnbs.
The cleaning fee is fixed. So maybe you start out thinking you'll stay 5 days, but end up staying 10. If they showed "all inclusive" rates you'd have confusion in the other direction. What you thought was the cheap hotel suddenly isn't because the cleaning fee for the two is very different.
Similarly, it's important to display the local taxes separately, because some customers may be e.g. entitled to a rebate for that part (some localities e.g. only charge foreigners).
Yeah, and we can come up with a story of why a hefty AirBnB fee should be hidden until the last moment as well.
Or we can notice that 99.99% of AirBnB users aren't going to have their taxes and fees rebated, and would be better off seeing the total price right away.
Yes, including the cleaning fee.
The users enter specific days anyway. The rate changes depending on which days those are. You can't infer the price for another date range without getting a quote specifically for that date range anyway. Separating the cleaning fee out achieves nothing.
The whole travel industry is chock full of this bullshit where vendors hide the full price (taxes, resort fees, etc.). It sucks.
And yes, as a previous user stated, it's very easy for us developers to include the fees and taxes in the average rate display. Fees are either fixed dollar amounts or a percentage of the room charge. It's trivial to add this into the average rate per night. Our corporate overlords instruct/force us not to.
Furthermore, my advice is to avoid the major OTAs such as Expedia. First, they engage in price-fixing. Hotels are not allowed to display prices cheaper than they appear in Expedia, otherwise they are threatened with delisting. Expedia calls this their "rate parity" policy. They should be taken to court by the DOJ. Second, they take a massive percentage from hotels as commission. Use Expedia to find availability, but then go direct to the hotel. Also, because hotels know they are getting absolutely FUCKED by Expedia. They will not put inventory on Expedia during peak seasons. They know they can get max occupancy without being charged a 30% by Expedia. Ski resort hotels are a prime example, but there are several other cases. In short fuck Expedia and probably AirBnB too.
Just google "expedia price fixing" and the list goes on, here is the most recent one: https://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2019/05/09/29082...
Rate parity isn't price fixing, and it's been going on for decades (pre-dates the Internet). The DOJ and EU regulators know about it.
The hotel can price rooms however they want, they then enter into a voluntary contract with an OTA to give them a percent.
If hotels could just consistently give consumers OTA prices minus that percentage directly customers would get savvy to that, and the legitimate service an OTA provides wouldn't be paid for.
It would just lead to shadier forms of advertising for the same service, like the OTA obscuring the name, location etc. of the hotel.
Maybe that'll happen, and maybe we'll be better off as a society. It'll impact a lot more than just OTA's, e.g. Google Adwords displaying a product for $100 when part of that margin is being given to Google.
> Second, they take a massive percentage from hotels as commission. Use Expedia to find availability, but then go direct to the hotel[...]
30% is very high, but if the hotel is voluntarily paying a 30% rate on advertisement that's how much it's worth to them.
Whether that's "fair" or not it's generally a bad deal for the consumer to book directly at the same rate, if something goes sideways they don't have the OTA's bargaining power to help them out.
> They will not put inventory on Expedia during peak seasons.
Good for them, but it seems 30% is worth it in the off-season if they go out of their way to sign-up to pay that.
> In short fuck Expedia and probably AirBnB too.
A hotel that's willing to pay Expedia 30% on X for ads isn't going to be better off with no X at all, which unless they're idiots is the alternative.
You're basically saying "fuck advertisement". Sellers stand to gain from advertising their services to buyers, that's why advertising exists.
Explain how that is not price-fixing at worst, and not shady at best?
I'm not maintaining that the current status quo is optimal, just that it's more complex than what people traditionally think of as price fixing, which e.g. would be all the gas stations in your area deciding to charge you the same for gas via explicit collusion.
Speaking more generally, the travel industry as a whole has always and probably always will spend a relatively large amount of advertising of some sort. Most of the industry is hoping to lure travelers with no local knowledge to their properties or services, and they're competing with other local properties.
Before OTAs hotels might expect to pay this advertising fee to travel agencies, or to pay to be part of a hotel chain as a guaranteed source of customers.
The unstated desire of people opposed to rate parity is to somehow have their cake and eat it too.
After all, if almost nobody looked at these OTA websites why care about it? It's not going to have much of a financial impact.
But they do care, because OTA's are a major source of revenue. And why is that? Because people get a lot of value from those sorts of market intermediaries, not just in the accommodation business, but in the form of major chain stores, Amazon, eBay etc. It's easier to compare products when you have a standardized comparison run by an intermediary.
As far as I can tell the scenario hotels hoping for the end of rate parity want is one where consumers might browse OTA websites, but be savvy enough to just visit the hotel's website directly to make a booking.
I don't see how that's going to be sustainable, you'd essentially have advertising with a free rider problem. Ending it wouldn't be the end of the world, but I don't see how we wouldn't just end up in some new equilibrium where accommodations wouldn't just pay a similar amount of money for advertising via some other means.
It's not like browsing organic Google results for hotels is some arcane wizardry, or visiting a town's listing of hotels (which the hotels generally don't pay for or get at really good rates) isn't known to people.
We disagree. I view rate parity as a form of price-fixing. I don't doubt the value OTAs provide to the consumer, but their value isn't sufficient enough to stand on its own without price fixing. Expedia knows this, and therefor uses its market position to fix prices and thus maintain is position. When challenged, which it has been numerous times, its legal team has been effective in arguing their point. I can't deny that. Perhaps my view is overly simplistic. I view someone telling me, if you want to sell your product on my site you have to sell it for the same price everywhere as price-fixing. Yes, its voluntary, but in practical terms its not because the hotel cannot survive without the OTAs. I won't weep too many tears, because the hotels could use their sufficient capital to address the problem. But, lets at least call a spade a spade here. If it looks, walks, and quacks. Well...
You brought up Amazon as an example of market indermediaries, otherwise known as middlemen. Are they engaging in price-fixing? What about ebay, are they engaging in price fixing? I'm actually interested if we can find a similar example to what OTAs do in another industry. I don't think we can.
End of the day, we had to switch to Airbnb's fee-hiding style because users are trained to expect the hidden fees.
It’s pretty easy to show an average rate that incorporates the various fees and make the detail available later.
Source: I've worked as a Sr. Engineer at an OTA for the last 5 years.
It's the same as Lyft and Uber giving you a "wait" estimate that almost always ends up being longer, but if the expected wait seems to be shorter, you are more likely to book the car and wait for it to show up.
Similarly, you are more likely to book the room/house/apartment on AirBnB if the price shown is lower than the final price.
Bad behavior. But everybody does this, one way or another.
You'll see different rates on different pages on EU, Australia (where drip pricing is illegal) and USA versions of the site for the same property.
The map only displays the nightly price, IIRC. And not being able to filter by total is a hostile UI.
Pretty sure Airbnb has A/B test results somewhere to back that up.
Lately the service really became horrible: Last minute cancellation, soulless places run like an industry. prices on the same level or even more expensive than hotels. Customer support is also completely unresponsive.
I'm now going back to hotels 90% of the times where I can expect a consistent quality of services.
They grew too fast and got arrogant in the process. I hope they quietly go away and get replaced by a company that does this correctly. I heard only good things about HomeAway lately
This has generally been my experience. It's very hit-or-miss, and some places were fantastic... but others weren't. I got jerked around a lot and ended up paying rates roughly on par with local hotels.
At least with the big name chain hotels I can generally predict what I'm going to get, what it will cost me, and I can easily harangue, bitch, complain, and possibly sue the actual chain. AirBnB makes it harder to seek a resolution, if needed.
I recently stopped using them after they asked to send in facsimiles of government ID to continue using their services (after being a customer with all 5 star reports over many years).
The frustration at that point leads one to suspect that it's actually hidden to prevent anything that could lead to transactions outside of the platform, where Airbnb would be unable to take their cut.
If there does turn out to be a means to establish contact, and a rental then happens outside of Airbnb's systems, do the terms of service actually restrict this? It just seems strange to me at the outset. As far as I know Amazon sellers aren't prohibited from also selling off-Amazon, but maybe housing and other industries have some conventions that are comparable?
While certainly it’s in Airbnb’s financial interests to keep transactions on platform, I saw a great deal of cases where fraudulent hosts (with fake listings) were encouraging folks to make off platform payments. Of course the first thing most guests do in those cases is complain to Airbnb and demand their money back — as if Airbnb had taken their money. Putting some friction helps Airbnb say, “We’re sorry that happened, but that’s not our problem.”
I think it's entirely possible that they are doing this because they expect to have to deal with whatever legal/regulatory issues they face around the world that have been in a grey area since they started and this is basically an invitation to regulators to do something now so that regulatory risks won't be perceived to be this massive red flag to investors as they shop the IPO around.
I'd for sure argue that regulation is Airbnb's greatest existential threat, especially at a time when we're all acutely aware of how expensive housing has become in urban centers where Airbnb makes most of their money.
This does seem early, but I’m sure there is some rationale to stay on the big bank’s radar screens and have them knocking down Airbnb’s door to be the lead bank on this deal.
I’m sure someone from investment banking will be along to add some color.
Since then, AirBnB have not added anything that benefits me. But booking.com have catched up massively. To the point that I prefer booking.com again these days. I would have never expected that to happen.
Some of my pet peeves with AirBnB:
AirBnB's reviews are not chronological. So you have to read them all to make sure you do not miss recent complaints.
AirBnB does not show the exact location of the apartments.
AirBnB sometimes removes negative reviews for no good reason.
AirBnB lets hosts get away with removing their listing (due to negative reviews) and relist them with a clean slate.
I really hope AirBnB will stay strong. A healthy competition between them and booking.com is probably best for travelers.
By the way, anybody here using something other then AirBnB or booking.com? Would love to hear if there are other good options to consider.
But in the past few years, at a seemingly accelerating pace, what an airbnb is has changed.
In the last few years when I've used them, not all but almost all of them have simply been unlicensed hotels run by investor-landlords who aren't present and at best will pay someone else to come meet you with a key, but usually just leave it in a lock box.
Everything feels cheap, and sketchy. There is no personality. You're not meeting anyone, getting local knowledge, living with a local. On the contrary, you're sometimes sharing the same apartment with other tourists.
If I don't get any of the good sides, all I'm left with is the downsides - unpredictability, suspicion from other residents in the building, the plethora of random ways things can go wrong when your host isn't available to help you out 24/7.
I'd honestly rather just pay the extra 20% or so for a basic hotel room to get the same thing but without those downsides. Booking.com or Hotels.com are now the places I go first, before Airbnb.
I'm not at all sure that Airbnb care about this to be honest. They obviously must be aware of it, yet it continues getting more like that, not less. I guess the growth and the numbers from running a cheap unlicensed hotel rooms service is just better than they could get from their original vision. Wish them well, but also wish the old Airbnb was back!
I've listened to a few podcasts from years ago with the founders and you can hear the excitement in their voices talking about the early vision and what it could be. And it was like that, years ago. It had its own problems, but it really was something truly great that wasn't really easily accessible before at any kind of scale.
I just imagine the founders coming with me to some of the places I've ended up staying, and imagining what they'd think, how disappointed they'd be at what it's become. How different it is from their original vision. They're probably not disappointed with how their business is doing, but for sure, the vision has evaporated along the way to enable this.
I recently stayed with a very kind lady at a low rate. I didn’t dislike her at all but I was staying in her house with her and it was just an odd experience for me.
Usually when I get an Airbnb it’s because I know the hotels/motels in the area are a racket and I want somewhere that is cheaper, bigger, and in a better location than the hotels. It’s especially useful and cheap when traveling in a group of 3+. I actually would prefer not to stay with a host who is present because it gives me anxiety.
The weird cheap investor units I've been in never had the owner around, but there was a lot of noise leakage between guests in different units because the units were low-quality industrial "pods" retrofitted into some warehouse space or something.
Awesome example of a major semantic difference depending where you place a hyphen.
I would guess "none". These are the kinds of complaints that "power users" have because they use websites like tools. Average users don't. My mother would look at the first three reviews and consider that in-depth research. The next time she uses AirBnB, she won't notice re-listings, or removed reviews.
In short, I don't think these kinds of issues are going to hurt their business.
This is something I noticed as a first time user.
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
Definitely not. They made valid points and I was sharing some thoughts of my own.
>In any case, it seems like a bold strategy to fight anecdata with anecdata.
I don't have evidence as strong as anecdata. I am making assumptions.
Interesting. A friend and I were looking for places this weekend and I kept posting airbnb listings, while he kept posting booking.com ones. I absolutely can't stand booking.com's website and we ended up with an airbnb one.
I can't recall many listings I avoided because of reviews. I might just be lucky, but pictures and words usually match reality
I usually go with hostelworld.com. I was a bit anxious in the beginning but in the last 3 years I've stayed in more than a dozen hostels and overall had a good experience. For example, there are two lovely small hostels in the Bay Area, one in Marin Headlands and one in Pigeon Point.
So who wins in 2020?
All the other features I don't even look at because I'm not interested in an 'adventure' given by some random guy with no professional experience.
Honestly surprised they haven't expanded at all within the stays experience.
PASS
They're just normal professional hotels / hostels / BNB now
> 'adventure' given by some random guy with no professional experience.
The tour I went on was with actual professionals
Point being, Airbnb may be same feature wise, but the offerings have become more professional, which for me personally defeats the purpose of Airbnb.
The only thing that annoys me the Airbnb booking experience, is that it's not really a booking, it's putting in a booking request and then waiting for the owners to approve. Compared to regular hotels.
I the prices kept changing at different views, I couldnt save a search, even active searches would just go away if i tapped back, they pushed me to link to a third party auth, but when I did they created a separate account and i could no longer reach the one that had my reservations. It was a mess all the way around.
The only thing I did like was all the weird places to stay.
While AirBnB might be pleasing on the eyes, Booking's UI is optimised for conversion. The benefit of "better UI and UX" is arguable here if it does not result in more $ for the business. Specially if they want to compete in the public market.
Disclaimer - Ex-Booking.com employee
Also, If you have not tried, I'd recommend giving the (android) app a go, bias aside, its one of the smoothest look-to-book experience I've had.
Regular hotels might not always be a live booking either. Every once in a while, someone misses a fax. Usually a real hotel has some slack to fix things when some one comes in with a reservation that didn't get booked.
The normal pricing range in hotels is 2 beds are normally priced (a small kids is optionally included) but anything more than that requires more rooms or a suite.
At Airbnb the price per person becomes much more reasonable, and that's before the ability to find the kids something to do since most places have TVs, a streamer and some game stuff.
2) Not enough IPOs so lots of investor interest to deploy capital into something( (thus driving up the price, making it more attractive for startups)
3) We're near the end of a 7~10 year cycle where lots of private VC capital was deployed and needs to be returned
4) 500 private investor maximum SEC rule
VC companies themselves raise money from investors to create a fund, which is then used to invest in startups. Generally, funds are raised with a specific timeline pitch for returns to the investors - often 7-10 years. In order to return money to investors, the investments in the fund have to actually pay money back to the VC firm - the best way to do this is via IPO (although acquisition is also an option).
Due to overall market conditions, a glut of investment happened in the VC space 7-8 years ago (i.e. a bunch of funds were started), and those funds now need to get money back to the investors to prove a nice ROI, so there's a push to get the startups that were funded by the fund to exit one way or another.
Eh I have heard this for the last 5 years
So either state your source or just say that you’re guessing.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/15/ahead-of-ipo-airbnb-achiev...
Here is one article from this past summer which continues to emphasize the exact same points a year later: https://medium.com/swlh/why-airbnb-wont-go-public-in-2019-56...
Here are some excerpts from that article:
—————
Airbnb’s last funding round was in the first months of 2017, over two years ago. There is a straightforward explanation for that. Airbnb makes money. It is that rare thing; a profitable tech company. That means it doesn’t have to run to become public quite as eagerly as other companies. Its growth can be funded by the money it takes in itself.
...
Getting access to capital from a vast pool of investors is one of the main reasons companies go public. Supporting an IPO is a time consuming and expensive affair. Since Airbnb doesn’t need as much money for research and development or expanding its market, there is less incentive to IPO.
...
There is one excellent reason that Airbnb will go public in 2020, though. That’s when some shares promised to employees will expire — meaning they won’t be able to reap the financial rewards that come with growing a company.
Airbnb is actually profitable (at least EBITDA) unlike these other companies and hasn’t raised a major round in a while since they don’t need capital. This makes them a much better direct listing candidate than those previous companies.
It was widely reported they met with Morgan Stanley about a direct listing and Morgan Stanley is considered the expert in the field since they managed the last few.
How is Reuters for a source? If you prefer something else it has been covered by the vast majority of the financial press. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-airbnb-ipo/airbnb-plans-p...
“In a short statement posted on its website on Thursday, Airbnb did not give any details on how it plans to list its shares, although it is widely expected to take a direct-listing route.
A direct listing to go public is a process in which no new shares are created and helps companies save millions of dollars in underwriting fees.”
So why can’t I know what is widely reported to media by company insiders and has been for years?
1) Neither SPOT or WORK has done great, especially WORK
2) IPO allows you to choose your investors. This gives you the opportunity to choose major institutional investors that are in for the long term which will help reduce stock volatility.
3) Even if you don't need money, raising billions can open up a lot of opportunities for the business and give you a warchest to derisk potential market downturns.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-airbnb-ipo/airbnb-plans-p...
“In a short statement posted on its website on Thursday, Airbnb did not give any details on how it plans to list its shares, although it is widely expected to take a direct-listing route.”
Spotify and Slack had fine initial listings, but they are both losing tons of money so the market reacted negatively as their quarterly earnings made this more and more clear. Not a great comparison to a company that has been printing money and hasn’t raised a serious round in years.
- The quality of places we've gotten in the U.S. has in general been lower and not entirely matching the description. With a couple exceptions, the U.S. AirBnB's have definitely been...not great. But we feel pressured to leave good reviews so that the host leaves us good counter review so that other hosts will make sure to book us.
- Outside of the U.S., the experience has been almost universally great. Better on average than hotels for the same price. Bigger, better locations, better prices, and so on.
- We've definitely moved from "spare room" to "entire place" and been much happier and less awkward feeling for everybody involved. However, some of the more memorably places have been meeting people in the places we stay.
- Some of the nicest places we've stayed were flats in Europe where the owner has taken a job in some other country and rents their place out on AirBnB. There was a particularly fantastic 6 days in Vienna in a two bedroom flat with a full kitchen, clothes washer, free parking, and a fully furnished living room, a 5 minute walk from the tram and a short 15 minute ride to the city center under $65 a night...absolutely insane.
- We've definitely stayed at places where we were instructed to say "we're friends of so and so". It felt weird, but we've never had a problem and we try to be particularly quiet and respectful of the community we're staying in. Still, it needs to be worked out and I can definitely see the side of other people who live in the building not liking it.
- I'm aware that AirBnB is not helping anybody's housing costs. On the flip side it definitely seems to be revitalizing some other housing markets in interesting neighborhoods. One enterprising place we stayed in Budapest was slowly being bought, renovated and flipped a flat at a time and some locals mentioned that the neighborhood has gone from run down to revitalized with all the new foot traffic coming from a couple buildings that were going through the same strategy.
- I think Japan is the closest to regulating it correctly. They've basically said, "if you want to run an AirBnB, it's fine, but you are now a limited use hotel." Of the half dozen places we've stayed in Japan, every single one followed the new law 100% and it wasn't a huge fuss. It honestly made it more comfortable to stay in since we didn't feel like usurpers as much. Bonus, every place we stayed in was also correctly outfitted with emergency exit signs and other "hotel safety things" like fire extinguishers and so on. They can only rent out their apartments for so many days-per-year which also helps with some of the property speculation bits I think.
- We've stayed at a couple places in economically depressed communities and it was very clear that the AirBnB was a very unique economic opportunity for the owners that was bringing in much needed income that they really didn't have access to in any other way. Very memorable, positive, stays in those cases because we felt we were doing a little bit of good.
I'm not very bullish on Airbnb, I used to practically live in Airbnb for over 3 years, but for the last 2 years I haven't even logged in and been only using booking.com.
I remember years back in London an Airbnb host that wasn't even the owner of the apartment but a tenant herself told me while moving in "tell everyone you're a friend, it's not allowed in this building but everyone's doing it"
Now landlords and building owners are catching up and most new developments are forbidding this contractually, while others do what they can to prevent their neighbours from letting to strangers.
I'm probably missing something, but I think the company is going down and they're pulling an exit scam.
I had the same bullshit happen to me a month ago in Hawaii.
More specifically the owner waited for the period where I can cancel to be over before demanding that (among other rules which were reasonable).
When I did not answer his message (I was considering my options, I have no intention to lie for a stranger), he contacted airbnb support who contacted me.
I explained that asking me to lie for him was ridiculous and I that I was ok with a full cancellation. The airbnb support then pressured me to keep the reservation.
The vacation was awesome but this place was pretty meh.
The same kind of issues happened later in Los Angeles.
That's just anecdotal, but I feel that the quality of the experience on Airbnb has really worsened for me in the past 1 or 2 years.
Too many people that (poorly) operate multiple airbnbs at the same time.
As far as I am concerned, hotels are back as my plan A. The prices are comparable with Airbnb in most cases and the experience is WAY less of a headache (no need to search for the keys for 2 hours because the owner tries to hide that there is an airbnb there ...).
AirBnB is doing fine. They've posted healthy profits for the past few years, which is more than can be said of nearly every other tech/startup company that has announced an IPO recently (Uber, Lyft, Pelaton, WeWork, Cloudflare, Slack, Postmates, and Pinterest are all unprofitable).
They raised billions and now they make more money every quarter so there is no reason to raise more money unless there are specific larger acquisitions or expansions that can't be self-funded.
It seems the regulatory product lifecycle is that AirBnB enters a new market, and then some time later that market starts to regulate and restrict it. How many new markets does AirBnB have left to exploit regulation?
They're clearly not - or if so, they're doing a pretty bad job at it, because most big-name tech startups that have announced IPOs have posted a track record of losses, not profits.
What? This isn't true at all.
As you mentioned, net income can easily be massaged, adjusted EBITDA, etc. Cash flow is harder to fake. Airbnb should have decent to good unit economics though.
Even if that profit was after tax and amortization, etc. (which it wasn't) it's a tiny fraction of what booking.com makes while Airbnb is still charging higher fees.
Your concerns about the future of the company are reasonable, but to call a profitable company going public an “exit scam” is ridiculous.
Day one investors transfered virtually all of their value to company insiders.
> We have experienced net losses in each year since our inception. In the years ended December 31, 2014, 2015 and 2016, we incurred net losses of $(30.8) million, $(47.0) million and $(54.9) million, respectively.
Blue Apron and AirBnB are not comparable.
Maybe because I'm getting older, but going through something like that would ruin my vacation.
I've lived in countless apartments where the residents were the loud ones, not the vacationers.
Now, with 300+ reviews, it's, sad, and maybe I was part of the change because I rented places and lived 50/50 in different parts of the world and it was possible w/ airbnb and I only tried to be cost negative.
I'm a host (a single "entire" house) and started in 2015, which in Australia was early-ish.
As host it's getting hard and thankless. Supply is driving prices down (about $40 a night less than a year ago) and vacancy is higher too. Guests are more than likely new or only have 1 or 2 reviews, and are not the early adopters looking for something different, they are people looking for cheap and easy accommodation (where easy means no responsibilities).
The review process is painful and hosts live constantly in fear of guests that leave glowing reviews, 5 stars for each category but 4 stars overall -- overall is the only rating that counts. Remember that hosts need an average of 4.7 to remain on the platform, so a couple of 4-star reviews can be devastating.
The other thing is that Airbnb keeps dictating terms for hosts. Children and infants are free!
Until then, they aren't worth shit as an IPO.
https://cloverly.com/blog/the-man-who-linked-co-to-climate-c...
Major cities have recognized the negative externalities that Airbnb has on rental vacancy and land values, and are starting to add on regulations of various strength. That will drag on growth.
The company gained its valuation from days past when people were buying new condos exclusively to rent 100% of the time on Airbnb, and cities are banning that sort of behaviour.
Is that an externality of AirBnB or poor city planning? Cities are eager to build offices and advertise to attract tourists, but convince themselves they don't need more residential construction. Fixing the underlying cause will work better than banning the symptom.
I'd say both. Poor city planning leads to it happening, but AirBnB exacerbates the problem. And for a politician, regulating AirBnB is much easier and a lot more understandable by the electorate.
Explaining how they should be reelected because of changes they made to fundamental housing policy that will take 30 years to materialize is a hard sell.
The thing about regulating symptoms is that it's cathartic without accomplishing much.
I was reading an article about a city that was upzoned in the 70s which I can't find now, but the gist of it was that everyone was worried the upzoning would change everything. In reality, in the 40 years since, only a few single family homes were torn down and replaced with multi-unit dwellings. Most of the land sales were still from one single family owner to another.
OTOH, if changes are held back for decades and demand is pent up (ie soaring prices and increasing commutes) then there's going to be a surge once changes are allowed. ie SF will see a far bigger, faster change than other places.
It's precisely the places that have a huge pent up demand for housing that have the biggest problem with Airbnb.
This also distorts the underlying value of the land, since you can make more money renting out on Airbnb than you can renting long term.
Alternatively, jealous neighbors are upset that someone has more money than them and are convinced that it must be because the tenant is basically hitler.
In other words, socially acceptable xenophobia.
The legal framework wasn’t there (this is 2016 I’m describing), and so I wonder why go public now. Get a more solid footing and then lobby for regulation to drown out other start ups?
There are counties who derive 1/3 of their revenues from Airbnb taxes. Probably won't be banning them.
https://www.outsideonline.com/2198726/did-airbnb-kill-mounta...
Some places are banning operations like airbnb, and others are embracing them with the aim of controlling the downsides.
Apartment owners in general don't like to allow subletting or renting because it makes things like liability and property insurance claims tricky if anything should go wrong, and people tend to like neighbors more than they do strangers walking around outside their door.
HOAs can be more strict on top of whatever existing city regulations exist.
AirBnB, as the booking agent for the hosts, doesn't get to ignore the regulations just because the host is liable for any violations. Because they're acting as an agent for the hosts, they're also bound by those regulations.
(AirBnB has claimed they are just a "platform" for connecting hosts and guests. But they handle too much of the transaction for both sides to just be a "platform"--they also handle payment, refunds, customer service, etc. Also, there's generally no such thing as a "platform" exception with respect to hoteling laws.)