Does Airbnb Really Need to Join Google’s New Vacation Rental Business?
Photo Credit: A short-term rental in Cape Town listed in Airbnb. So far, Airbnb is not participating in Google's relatively new vacation rental business. Airbnb
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Do or die? Test and learn? Now or never? As Airbnb marches toward going public in 2020, a key question in many minds will be how Airbnb deals with Google — and at what price. There are no slam-dunk answers.
Expedia does it. So does Booking Holdings, TripAdvisor, Vacasa, Red Awning, and several of the online travel agencies' sub-brands such as Agoda, Vrbo, Hotels.com, and Holiday Lettings.
But over the weekend, when Google debuted its new four-pack stack of vacation rentals in Google Search, a feature that's a gateway to Google's travel page, including vacation rentals and other travel businesses, notably absent from the mix of usual participants was Airbnb.
With short-term rental giant Airbnb intending to go public in 2020, and considering one of its selling points is its brand awareness and all of the direct traffic that it attracts without having to pay billions of dollars annually to Google, a critical decision will be whether Airbnb should participate in Google vacation rentals.
Over the last six months, according to SimilarWeb, Airbnb got about 60 percent of its desktop and mobile traffic direct without having to pay Google or other search engines. In contrast, Booking.com
