The Untold Story of Booking.com's Growth in 21 Million Rooms
Skift Take
Booking.com wants to change the narrative: Its growth, and especially its girth, compare favorably with Airbnb's on the apartment rental front. And Booking.com can show some digital one-up-manship too because all of its 21 million rooms are instantly confirmable.
Feeling the heat because of all the buzz about Airbnb's global growth trajectory with its more than 2 million listings, Booking.com for the first time has released its own room tallies: 21 million bookable rooms.
Until now, Booking.com merely reported its number of properties, currently 824,231, and not the number of bookable rooms. The company hadn't talked much about apartment and condo rentals but Skift pointed out last month that Airbnb Needs to Watch Out for Booking.com's Apartment Ambitions.
Here's the room breakdown: Booking.com's numbers-crunchers identified on the site 14.4 million bookable hotel rooms, 1.8 million vacation rental rooms and 4.8 million rooms in other types of lodging, including apartments, villas, chalets, bed & breakfasts, guest houses, boats, igloos, tree houses and farm stays.
While Silicon Valley and others rave about the expansion and mainstreaming of Airbnb, with its purported 2 million listings in 190 countries, and 60 million guests, Booking.com reports that its own "unique accommodations properties" (everything beyond its hotels and vacation rentals) increased 32 percent and
