Airbnb Flights: Should It Build, Buy or Borrow an Airline Booking Service?
Skift Take
A prudent strategy for Airbnb might be to initially partner with an online travel agency in an affiliate relationship so it can access flights for its customers. In that way, Airbnb could test whether its users want to book flights on the site without taking the big risks involved in making a large acquisition, which could always come later.
The day could come when you might receive an email or text like this: "Thanks for booking your flight on Airbnb.com. Your flight booking is confirmed; please keep this confirmation code to reference your booking. Thanks for choosing Airbnb."
Alternative lodging provider Airbnb opened the cockpit door to such a possibility when it cryptically displayed a reference to "flights" in a presentation about its apps at Airbnb Open in Los Angeles last month.
As Airbnb expands beyond its core short-term rental business into tours and activities, Bloomberg reported this week that Airbnb, with a valuation of $30 billion, is mulling getting into the flights business through an acquisition or building its own product by leveraging data from airfare distributors such as Sabre, Amadeus, or Google's ITA Software.
Flight online travel agency operators, veterans of the business and an investor were unanimous when approached by Skift that Airbnb wouldn't likely be entering the flights arena, with
