The Future of Short-Term Rentals After the Pandemic and an Airbnb IPO
Skift Take
The entire hospitality industry would agree that short-term rentals led the tentative recovery in the spring and into the summer in many parts of the world. But a key question will be how will they respond when hotels and cities come back in earnest — and with vaccines a real possibility, they certainly will.
Whether it is for hosts, property managers or platforms, liquidity and survival are the overriding issues for the short-term rental industry at this stage of the pandemic, and will remain so for an extended period.
The Covid-19 crisis is far from over. Having chopped workforces, rejiggered business models, halted investments and product initiatives, or shut operations, the short-term rental industry around the world faces varying degrees of resurrected lockdowns and other challenges as the coronavirus outbreak spikes and dips.
For example, Skift Research's U.S. Travel Tracker October 2020, completed in early November right before the U.S. presidential election, showed that only 37 percent of Americans traveled in October, with visiting friends and families the most popular reason, and small towns and the countryside constituted the most popular destinations.
Still, hotel stays jumped significantly, eight percentage points to 56 percent of all stays in October, according to the
