Airbnb News

There's a lot of work that goes into matching hundreds of conference attendees with hundreds of local residents who want to cook for them. But as international food-sharing platforms fine-tune their systems, this could be something that scales significantly based simply on growing attendee awareness and demand.

2016 is going to be the hump year when sharing companies move from the cheap seats of the meetings industry to center stage.

More meeting planners are considering Airbnb as a viable accommodation option, based on new partnerships and programs that dramatically increase the value proposition for themselves, their clients, and their attendees.

San Francisco is at the forefront of showing how tourism bureaus, which rely on hotel bed taxes for funding, can collaborate with room-sharing companies that are in direct competition with hotels.

More data on Airbnb's business will hopefully give the industry greater insight into how it really fits into the evolving hospitality ecosystem.

This mashup of leaders in travel, media, commerce, and IT represents the cross-industry synergies fueling the rise of the digital platform economy. It also represents the growing link between smart city development and tourism, which is going to explode in 2016.

Business travelers in the U.S. are now taking more rides in Ubers than rental cars. This is huge progress for Uber and represents a major problem for traditional car rental companies.

We can't wait until Airbnb goes public so we can finally get some transparency and stop hearing about hosts trying to make ends meet. It's so much more sophisticated than that.

It is very attractive for Booking.com to abstain from charging travelers a booking fee on vacation rentals. But the lack thereof means Booking.com's commissions may not be competitive and shareholders will likely demand that Booking.com maximize the revenue opportunity and impose the booking fee.

Airbnb, in theory, could ease some cities' opposition to its business by giving landlords a revenue share of their tenants' rentals. It's an interesting idea, albeit with tons of hurdles.