Airbnb looks to mobile to make hosts more responsive and boost revenue
Skift Take
The peer-to-peer rental movement already is transforming the lodging industry, and mobile adoption, as evidenced by the Airbnb statistics, will help bring it more into the mainstream.
Airbnb is now getting more than a fourth of its traffic from mobile, and the rental-sharing site is using this burst in smartphone usage to solve a major dilemma -- hosts who wait for days to respond to potential guests' booking inquiries.
In fact, Airbnb, which says its iPhone app, launched in late 2010, has now been downloaded more than 1 million times, says users' messages get responded to three times faster on mobile than over the Web.
Airbnb users, hunting for short-term apartment, vacation home and houseboat shares, sent more than 530,000 messages on its mobile platform in August, the company says -- at a clip of about a message every five seconds.
So mobile users are less apt to be forced to wait for days after sending a host questions about the property's availability, costs and amenities because the hosts receive push notif
