Airbnb Needs to Watch Out for Booking.com's Apartment Ambitions
Skift Take
Booking.com wants to answer the needs of "one customer," the one who books an apartment one day and a five-star hotel the next. Yes, a revolution in lodging is under way and Booking.com is now shouting about it.
Booking.com has long offered apartment or condo hotels in addition to traditional hotels but it has recently been scaling up its apartment and homestay offerings and has begun to shout about it.
Whether this is part of A/B testing or something more permanent is unclear but a quick perusal of Booking.com shows a ton of new and prominent messaging about Booking.com's apartments' choices.
While Airbnb has been seeking to round its own offering with vacation rentals, including those from professionally managed properties, the Priceline Group's Booking.com can tout a much more wider array of lodging types in its 1.8 million listings of hotels, vacation rentals, apartments, homestays, guest houses, bed & breakfasts, hostels, and boats. Airbnb, on the other hand, claims 1.5 million listings, although you won
