Skift Travel News Blog

Tripadvisor filled in the blanks, naming two executive appointments to flesh out a reorganization of its core business that the company disclosed during its fourth quarter earnings call a week ago.

Sanjay Raman, who had previous stints at Airbnb, Greylock and Google, starting working in January as chief product officer, a new position within Tripadvisor’s core business segment.

Likewise, Kristen Dalton, who has served in Tripadvisor roles since 2019 as vice president of financial planning and analysis and interim head of the company’s business to consumer group, started serving in January as chief operating officer of the company’s core business. That is a new position, as well.

Core Business Is Distinct From Viator and TheFork

What is Tripadvisor’s core business? Tripadvisor defines it as “Tripadvisor branded hotels, Tripadvisor branded display and platform, Tripadvisor experiences and dining revenue, and other revenue,” including cruise. Tripadvisor recently de-emphasized vacation rentals, flights, car rentals within its “other revenue” category.

Although Tripadvisor experiences and dining revenue are part of the core segment, the separately branded Viator experiences and TheFork dining revenue don’t fall within the core business. That means the January appointees won’t be responsible for Viator and TheFork, which have separate teams.

With the appointments and the reorganization of Tripadvisor’s core segment, Tripadvisor now had functionally led teams in operations (led by Dalton), marketing (John Boris), product (Raman) and engineering (Sugata Mukhopadhyay).

Under the prior structure, the teams were organized along business to consumer and business to business lines.

While Viator reached 171 percent of 2019 revenue levels in 2022, TheFork hit 99 percent, and Tripadvisor’s core business generated only 79 percent of 2019 revenue.

Pending legislation in Puerto Rico would limit the use of short-term rentals in residential areas to 30 percent of the property, a move that an Airbnb official characterized as a “defacto prohibition.”

“Thousands of properties in Puerto Rico could be deleted or eliminated, which provide this service, which welcome millions of visitors to Puerto Rico, who have been part of the success of Puerto Rican tourism,” Carlos Muñoz , Airbnb’s director of public policy and communications for Central America and the Caribbean told Elnuevodia.com.

House bill 1557, which was introduced in November, would require hosts who seek to use more than 30 percent of their space for short-term rentals to apply for a permit to change the designated use from residential to commercial.

The legislation is geared to thwart short-term rentals’ sometimes-disruptive impact on neighborhoods, including house parties, affordable housing shortages, and escalating rents.

Muñoz claimed that Airbnb’s footprint in Puerto Rico represented about 1 percent of the housing stock, the story said. However, short-term rentals made up more than half the available housing in cities such as San Juan, Cataño and Aguadilla, and around one-third in other popular tourism areas in 2022, according to Abexus Analytics, the story said.

Airbnb was a key factor in driving Puerto Rico’s tourism recovery.

However, the Center for a New Economy recently conducted a study on the impact of short-term rentals in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. The study found that a 10 percent increase in short-term rental density in relation to the total number of housing units, led to a 7 percent increase in median rents and a 23 percent jump in housing unit prices.

Actor (and travel tech investor) Ashton Kutcher is at it again, as his Sound Ventures venture capital firm has co-led a $15 million investment in climate tech company Chooose.

It’s the latest in a long chapter of travel investing for Kutcher, revealed on Friday, with previous deals including Affirm, Airbnb, Hipmunk and Citymaps, which was bought by TripAdvisor .

Norway-based Chooose, which offers climate solutions such as carbon offsetting, carbon removals and sustainable aviation fuel, already works with global companies and airlines including British Airways, Air Canada and Japan Airlines. It also works with Booking.com, Trip.com and SAP Concur.

Startups like this have fast emerged out of the need to give companies better insight into their carbon footprints when flying. This extra capital will go towards scaling up its platform, and further “embed climate action solutions into customer experiences.” It also plans to expand into new geographies, thanks to the funding provided by Soundwaves, which is the sustainability-focused vehicle of Kutcher’s fund.

GenZero, a decarbonisation-focused investment company owned by Singapore’s Temasek, also co-led the investment round. Existing investors Shell Ventures and Vinyl Capital also participated in the strategic capital round. Other current investors include travel technology giant Amadeus and Contrarian VC.

UPDATE: This article was amended to remove the series B mention, which had originally been provided.

Building on initiatives that had mixed results in the past, Airbnb is debuting an Airbnb-Friendly Apartments program to enable long-term renters in multifamily buildings where landlords permit it to list their rooms or apartments on Airbnb.

For both guests and hosts, one of the things the program aims to do is avoid the all-too-frequent situation where guests have to pretend they are part of the host’s visiting family or a close friend because the building doesn’t allow Airbnb rentals.

The newest incarnation of the program enables long-term renters to browse for multifamily buildings that allow Airbnb short-term rentals, get in touch with the management of the building, and, like other first-time hosts, get access to experienced hosts to help with starting out on Airbnb and listing their apartments.

“Renters interested in hosting a spare room, or their entire apartment when they’re out of town, can browse more than 175 Airbnb-friendly apartment buildings, subject to availability, in 25+ markets across the U.S., including Houston, Phoenix, and Jacksonville,” Airbnb stated as part of the announcement.

The company added that renters participating in this multifamily building program over three months hosted an average of nine nights per month and earned an average of $900 net of Airbnb and landlord fees.

Airbnb has had issues with some of these sorts of arrangements in the past. Several years ago, for example, Airbnb enabled a Miami-area developer, Niido, to use the Airbnb brand and enable tenants to host short-term rental guests, but other tenants felt blindsided by the arrangement, and Airbnb eventually sued the developer.

UnderTheDoormat Group CEO Merilee Karr said her company’s new technology and distribution agreement with Visit Oman can be a novel approach to short-term regulation — one where technology can spur governments to embrace the sector rather than shun it.

Through an agreement signed last month in Muscat, Oman, government-approved property listings delivered through the UK’s UnderTheDoormat Group’s Hospira property management and distribution platform were live in November in time for the World Cup in Qatar.

Oman already offered had short-term rentals through hotel licenses and from a variety of players on big global platforms such as Airbnb and Booking.com.

But Karr said the tech partnership breaks new ground, officially opens the market, and provides Oman with the transparency it sought about an otherwise-fragmented sector.

Property developers, hospitality companies, small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), and eventually individually owned short-term rentals that are licensed can connect their properties through Hospira to access the market, and the major global platforms, she said.

The Visit Oman-UnderTheDoormat Group pact is exclusive, Karr said.

Like others in the Middle East, Oman is trying to develop a more diversified tourism economy.

“Through the Visit Oman gateway, the Hospiria platform will provide an efficient launching point for Omani companies, SMEs, and property owners to place their apartments, villas and homes onto the short-term rental market globally,” said Sahib Al Mamari, managing director of Visit Oman, as part of the announcement. “This latest Visit Oman initiative with UnderTheDoormat falls in line with the broader, existing Oman Tourism Vision 2040 strategy, and serves to shift the Sultanate of Oman towards a more diversified and developed tourism economy, and one that leverages digital innovation and technology to maximize value for the Omani tourism market, as well as the tourism-related SME economy in Oman.”

Airbnb said that the flexible search features it has rolled out since early 2021 have so far diverted bookings from destinations coping with overtourism and peak travel times, according to data it shared on Friday.

The short-term rental booking giant has increasingly offered search tools — see Skift’s earlier coverage: “Airbnb’s Next Big Change: Search” — in response to evidence that many people don’t have a destination or fixed dates in mind when they start researching trips.

Some of Airbnb’s new data points from its first whitepaper on “sustainable tourism” (embedded below).

• “In 2019, the top 10 most visited cities on Airbnb in the European Union — including Paris, Barcelona, and Rome — accounted for 20 percent of all trips in Europe, whereas they account for just 14 percent of trips in 2022.”
• “Guests using flexible search tools book less often in the 20 most popular destinations on Airbnb in Europe (-17.5 percent) and more often in less-visited communities ranked outside Airbnb’s top 400 destinations (+35.5 percent), when compared to guests booking via traditional search on Airbnb.”
• “Guests booking via Airbnb’s flexible search tool—that provides an option to include a location without dates—are also more likely to book outside the top 10% most popular dates (-7.3 percent) and are more likely to book nights on weekdays (+5.7 percent).”
• “Flexible search is also helping to redirect guests approximately 5 miles farther away from their initial intended location within cities, compared to traditional searchers on Airbnb … In Amsterdam, flexible bookers more often stay outside the city’s inner limits (+32.5 percent) compared to traditional bookers.”

As context: Airbnb’s search changes had two components.

People who don’t have a destination in mind can now be inspired by Airbnb’s new “Categories” category, which has been viewed more than 120 million times since August, according to company statements. This tool helps divert reservations away from Europe’s most saturated hotspots, according to Nathan Blecharczyk, Airbnb co-founder and chief strategy officer, when discussing the report at Web Summit in Lisbon on Thursday.

Travelers with flexible dates have been able to take advantage of Airbnb’s recently added feature that lets them say they’re really interested in traveling anywhere for a week and a week or a month anytime in the next year. The tool lets some travelers avoid peak time crushes in travel because of seasonality.

The report’s data points echos comments Co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky made at Skift Global Forum in September.

“What we want to do now is we want to be more in the inspiration business,” Chesky said. “You come to Airbnb and we can point demand to where we have supply. … We can highlight what makes us unique and get into the top of the purchasing funnel, which is basically giving people ideas of where to travel based on what’s available.”

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky (see full video)

Airbnb has been attempting to cope with the overtourism ever since 2018, when it created an “office of healthy tourism,” which at the time was the company’s term for proper tourism growth management. It began adding flexible search tools in early 2021, as Skift reported.

Skift coined the term overtourism to describe “a potential hazard to popular destinations worldwide, as the dynamic forces that power tourism often inflict unavoidable negative consequences if not managed well.”

See Airbnb’s sustainable tourism report, below:

Airbnb executives have talked a lot about how they have reduced their spending on performance marketing (think: buying ads in Google search results) to focus on brand marketing (think: subway posters advertising the company’s new “OMG” category of properties). So how much do they spend on brand and how much on performance?

The short answer is we don’t know for sure. In its first year after going public in December 2020, the short-term rental giant didn’t break out its brand marketing as a share of sales and marketing expenses in its financial results.

This year, though, it began to provide a touch more color, though not enough detail for a full picture.

The company doesn’t disclose how much it spends on performance marketing. Yet it has begun disclosing its year-over-year increases in search engine marketing and advertising spending. In the first nine months of the year, its search engine marketing and advertising expenditure rose by $76.9 million year-over-year. Sadly we don’t know what the total amount of performance marketing was in 2021 to compare it with.

What we can see for sure is that the bump in performance marketing represented a comparatively smaller increase than the company’s increased expenditure on brand marketing. We know that the company increased its brand campaign spending and that the increase was two-and-a-half times as much as the increase of its performance marketing.

In the first nine months this year, the company spent $771.9 million on “brand and performance marketing,” according to financial filings published on Thursday. Of that, $202 million, or 26 percent, represented increased spending on specific brand marketing campaigns.

Sadly, we don’t know the company’s total spending on brand marketing.

But we know the increased spending was meant to support campaigns including its “OMG” category of properties. Since the category’s introduction, the OMG listings have been viewed more than 300 million views, the company claimed this week.

Brand marketing is critical to the company’s ability to continue to attract guests and hosts through direct and unpaid channels, which executives say are cheaper than advertising on Google, Facebook, and other channels.

The company’s other “sales and marketing” costs included personnel-related expenses for its communications teams and for “policy,” which cost a separate $335.7 million in the first nine months of the year — representing a 3 percent increase year-over-year.

Added up, the company spent about $1.1 billion on “sales and marketing” in the first nine months of this year. That was about 17 percent of revenue, far lower than what traditional online travel agencies spend, as Skift has analyzed before.

Boosting Incentive Payments to Customers?

An unspecified amount of Airbnb’s other sales and marketing money was used for referral incentives and coupons. The company has for years made payments to customers via referral programs. Airbnb typically offers a coupon credit for a future booking after a person refers someone to the online agency and that new customer completes their first stay.

The company doesn’t spell out how much it spends on these incentive programs. It appears to mostly lump the amount along with refunds it offers to customers upset with something going wrong in their Airbnb experience.

Intriguingly, the total number of customer payouts for incentives and refunds has increased this year. In the comparable third quarters in 2020 and 2021, Airbnb kept these sums at about $85 million. But in the third quarter of 2022, the total number of incentive payments and refunds rose to $152 million. That was 78 percent more.

Have refunds gone up as the pandemic has ended? Perhaps. But it’s also possible that the company instead increased its referral and related marketing programs, such as where it offers coupons. The company hasn’t broken out the details.

Energy Credits for Hosts in Britain?

On Thursday, the company debuted another type of brand-boosting program. In the UK, Airbnb debuted a sustainable hosting fund worth about $1.1 million (£1 million) to help property managers who want to make their lodging more energy efficient.

Many hosts are struggling to cope with spiking energy costs in the UK because Russia is disrupting energy supplies to Europe during its war on Ukraine.

Airbnb will make grants to hosts of about $3,300 (£3,000). Qualifying actions include switching to a more energy-efficient boiler or heat pump and insulating a roof. Details are at the company’s sustainability fund site.

Overall, Airbnb appears to have found alternatives to paid performance marketing to be more cost-effective. For more context, watch Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky explain the company’s strategy in this video from Skift Global Forum 2022.

Mexico City’s mayor has signed a deal with Airbnb to help encourage more digital nomads — people working online remotely — to work in the capital city with the help of a new informational website.

Airbnb said on Wednesday it had created a site to “showcase unique cultural and creative destinations and experiences” in Mexico’s capital city. The so-called “remote working hub” shows examples of extended-stay rentals, entry requirements, and visa policies. It also highlights experiences led and sold by locals that remote workers could take part in to understand the city better.

Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum’s and Airbnb’s promotional effort is also supported by UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural agency.

“Mexican entrepreneurs will participate in UNESCO-led training to develop authentic cultural experiences that represent Mexico City’s unique, cultural and creative traditions across many diverse neighborhoods,” according to an Airbnb statement.

Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said in a press conference that the impact on local renters should be minimal, Reuters reported.

“Most digital nomads choose to stay in expensive neighborhoods, where the rent is already higher than other areas of the capital, such as Condesa, Roma, and Polanco,” Sheinbaum said, according to Reuters.

For more on this topic, see Skift’s Future of Work Briefing.

Toss out all the cliches about the woes of “a dog’s life” because many dogs — and cats and other domesticated animals — are now living on Airbnb.

That’s because during the first six months of 2022, around 25 percent of the nights booked that included a pet were for stays lasting 28 days or longer, Airbnb stated Tuesday.

Many of the pets’ human owners, whether they are working, visiting or living in an Airbnb since Covid-19 upended previous job and other rituals of life, were likewise attaching themselves to long-term stays.

“Guests continue to stay longer in Airbnb,” CEO Brian Chesky told financial analysts in August. “They’re not just traveling Airbnb, they’re now living on Airbnb. We saw long-term stays of 28 days or more remain our fastest-growing category [during the second quarter] by trip nights compared to 2019. The long-term stays has increased nearly 25 percent from a year ago. And actually, long-term stays have increased almost 90 percent since Q2 2019.”

In addition, Airbnb said today more than 3 million pets stayed in Airbnb’s since November — whether overnights, weekends getaways or longer stays.

Airbnb hosts can decide whether they want to allow visits including pets, and they can set fees for these add-ons.

These statistics Airbnb touted about pet travel presumably are increases from prior periods, although an Airbnb spokesperson said she didn’t have additional data to provide.

Airbnb tied the pet travel to its implementation of host insurance coverage for pet damages in 2021.

Although many pets are now living on Airbnb coming out of the pandemic, they are probably not living like the locals very much. Nor is it clear they want to.

Airbnb.org and Expedia Group are providing support to people displaced by Hurricanes Fiona and Ian.

Airbnb.org, a nonprofit that says it operates independently from Airbnb, announced that it has committed $5 million to provide free housing on a temporary basis to people displaced by Hurricane Fiona in the Caribbean and Hurricane Ian on the U.S. mainland.

“These stays will be funded by Airbnb and other donors to Airbnb.org,” the group said.

In the U.S. mainland, for example, Airbnb.org said it is collaborating with Global Empowerment Mission and local and state authorities to identify hurricane victims who need housing.

In Puerto Rico, Airbnb.org is working with local organizations that can utilize its grants to house first responders, the organization said.

Meanwhile, Expedia Group donated an unspecified amount of money to Volunteer Florida to help communities that were in Hurricane Ian’s path, an Expedia Group spokesperson said. Part of that effort includes Expedia’s working with Visit Florida to help people find housing.

As it has done in past disasters, Expedia launched an emergency accommodations portal to help people locate available hotels in Florida, for instance.