If you search for short-term rentals on Booking.com, Vrbo and, to a lesser extent, on Airbnb in New York City for stays after Tuesday’s deadline mandating that hosts be registered, you’ll still find numerous listings that seemingly flout the rules.
25.08.2023 - 14:23 / skift.com / Brian Chesky / Dennis Schaal / Glenn Fogel
The most important story I wrote about online travel and short-term rentals in 2022 was my massive, three-part .
Here are Parts 1, 2 and 3 of that Deep Dive.
In their own words, you can read interviews with 30 founders, co-founders and entrepreneurs from around the world who literally created the online version of the sector. They often tell anecdotes and detail deals that non-disclosure agreements barred them from spilling at the time.
There are plenty of behind-the-scenes tales, such as when the CEOs or executive teams of the major global hotel brands paraded quietly and separately into Airbnb headquarters in San Francisco or got visits from an Airbnb official in 2014 in get-to-know-you sessions. Travel agents often go on fam trips, and these were similar familiarization excursions after a fashion for hotel executives looking to learn more about the exploding home-sharing sector.
But beyond the industry gossip, personalities and disclosures, there are lessons in this oral history of short-term rentals, some of which I recounted here.
Among them, Expedia in its early days thought its hotel strategy would work for short-term rentals. Nope. It goes without saying that companies need to get intimate with a new sector and understand its customers. Copy and paste doesn’t work.
Another lesson that both HomeAway/Vrbo and Booking.com came to understand is that a degree of greater risk-taking about apartment-sharing would have done them well. HomeAway initially underestimated the Airbnb threat, and shied away from trying to acquire Airbnb because HomeAway, which was on the cusp of becoming a public company, didn’t want to deal with the fact that many of Airbnb’s listings were illegal.
“Brian (Chesky) and I talk,” Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel said earlier this year as part of the oral history. “Sometimes we’re at conferences and we’ll say hello and stuff. We’ve spoken. Yeah. Give this man credit. He created a giant business. If I had a time machine, there’d be a whole bunch of things I’d do differently. I’d be willing to tell our investors, and tell everybody, that we believe the future requires us to sacrifice some of our near-term profitability to more fully invest in the future in this area
In an era today when investors are placing a high value on profitability, it’s important to remember that placing bets on currently unprofitable business lines for the sake of growth can be essential.
If you search for short-term rentals on Booking.com, Vrbo and, to a lesser extent, on Airbnb in New York City for stays after Tuesday’s deadline mandating that hosts be registered, you’ll still find numerous listings that seemingly flout the rules.
Blueground is seeing its apartments being rented out as safe havens from political upheavals.
Silkhaus, a United Arab Emirates-based platform for short-term rentals, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $7.75 million in a seed funding round.
>>Ukio, a Barcelona-based short-term rental platform focused on remote workers, has raised $28 million (€27 million) in a Series A round of funding.
Airbnb’s move to get more transparent and show up-front a stay’s total price before taxes in most of the world outside Europe will have a ripple effect across much of the short-term rental sector because of the company’s substantial influence.
UnderTheDoormat Group CEO Merilee Karr said her company’s new technology and distribution agreement with Visit Oman can be a novel approach to short-term regulation — one where technology can spur governments to embrace the sector rather than shun it.
Short-term accommodation in Spain’s 20 biggest cities is rapidly catching up with the number of rooms managed by hotels, a study [see embed, below] released on Tuesday found, prompting hoteliers to call for better regulation of their upstart rivals.
Tech startups involved in the travel industry raised nearly $118 million this week.
Pending legislation in Puerto Rico would limit the use of short-term rentals in residential areas to 30 percent of the property, a move that an Airbnb official characterized as a “defacto prohibition.”
Due to an increase in demand in the short-term rental sector, Skift is back with our Skift Short-Term Rental Summit on June 7 in New York City. Building upon Skift’s comprehensive coverage of short-term rentals, this summit will focus on the forefront of the impact of technology, platforms, and professionalization on both the urban and traditional vacation rental category.
In the era of slow travel and quicker planning, those who wait until late might win.
There is now another subscription service for short-term rentals.