- Airbnb Makes Its Battle Against Booking and Expedia Official With New Hotel Campaign by Skift. Personally I’ve been using AirBnB less and less recently as the number of unique/cheap properties seems to be declining and the number of mass market rooms seems to be increasing. That’s not why I use airBnB, but obviously it’s a strategy working for them.
- 25,000 Miles on Most Major US Carriers for Switching Phone Providers – Churnable Over and Over! by Point Me To The Plane. Looking forward to this series.
- The Fine Print: Fighting Citi Prestige’s ‘Trip Delay’ Shenanigans by Frequent Miler. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.
- Nyepi celebrations: Mobile internet turned off for Bali’s New Year by BBC News. There will still be internet available via WiFi, but phone data will be turned off for the day. Airport is also closed and other travel is usually difficult/impossible.
I’ve always thought Airbnb was the Ebay of the travel industry. The idea of mom & pop renting out their room to you sounds good in theory, but not always so good in practice. The “sharing economy” has limits in the real world: professional hospitality is not necessarily a bad thing.
This partially explains why Airbnb is increasingly shifting to more professionally-run properties. Increasingly, the listings are dominated by people making their airbnb rentals “a business” — just like on ebay.
On the other hand, I’ve always thought the high commission structure of the online travel agencies was “a problem.” As a savvy traveler, I’ve been able to make this work for me: I can often capture for myself all (and often, more than all) the commission the property is paying to the OTA. But I can’t really understand why that commission is so high. Twenty percent and more doesn’t seem like a fair commision for providing an online listing. It’s just not that hard and expensive to operate an OTA; there’s not enough value added.
I don’t think airbnb is the right platform to challenge the OTA commission structure, but if I were in the independent lodging business, I’d sure hope that somebody came along to do so.
“Skift ” not “Skrift.”
Not sure why I always do this
Airbnb’s are definitely getting more expensive as they get more market share and become more mainstream. We use them all the time when we travel as a family because we want extra bedrooms for kids and a kitchen. Used to be you could get houses in good locations for $200-225/night, nowadays similar places are $275-325/night. Still a better deal than hotels because of the extra space, but not nearly as good as it used to be.
Have noticed that in supply heavy locations like Paris, prices have stayed low because there are so many apartments on Airbnb, they have to stay competitive to get bookings.
love these posts.. keep em coming
I was slightly annoyed that I missed the golden age of the MCI phone line miles deal until I realized that I would have been around 9-10 years of age. Yeah, not much I could’ve really done then.