6 Takeaways About Airbnb's Potential Impact on the Hotel Industry
Skift Take
The biggest conclusion here is that hoteliers can't afford to dismiss the impact, however large or minuscule it may be, that Airbnb is having on the lodging industry, and on their bottom lines, too. Plenty of reports may tell us different things, but the universal thread is that Airbnb is here, and it can't be ignored.
A new report from STR, a hotel industry research firm, looks at Airbnb-supplied data in 13 global markets from Dec. 1, 2013 to July 31, 2016, to examine the performance of both hotels and Airbnb.
STR's report seems to suggest that Airbnb isn't quite the threat to traditional hotels that other reports, most notably Morgan Stanley's recent findings, might lead you to believe.
However, that doesn't mean hoteliers should stop paying close attention to the alternative accommodations giant and its peers, either.
"Airbnb is here and it's here to stay," Jan Freitag, SVP of Lodging Insights for STR said. "The hotel industry has to look at it as a new way for the traveling public to spend their lodging dollars. It's worth studying them very carefully in your specific submarkets and understanding what the competition in your submarket is like, and understanding that not every unit is necessarily competitive."
In compiling the report, STR was careful to try to compare the types of listings data that would be most comparable to hotel rooms, like removing listings that are for shared rooms or private rooms in a shared space, or listings that could accommodate more than seven people.
While Airbnb, in total, has more than 3 million listings worldwide, STR looked only at about 1 million of those listings which were most compatible to hotel rooms to compare to its hotel data. By comparison, Marriott International has approximately 1.1 million rooms/listings, followed by Hilton Worldwide with 774,000 rooms/listings.
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