Articles tagged “hosts”

Which short-term rental companies and strategies are building momentum, and can they maintain it when a full travel recovery takes hold? The Skift Short-Term Rental and Outdoor Summit will feature executives who'll have much to say about these issues May 19, and beyond.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said the company expects to add millions of new hosts in the next few years, and it has plans to simplify the host signup process. But Airbnb has to be concerned that over the last six months that strategic growth imperative has been tough going.

Vrbo indeed seems to be stealing a bit of market share from Airbnb in the U.S. in recent months, albeit from a much smaller base. Vrbo's aggressive marketing campaign earlier this year appears to be paying off.

Booking.com faces tough-going in U.S. short-term rentals. Its business model has hosts perceiving they pay lower commissions to Airbnb, and the latter is has a big brand advantage. At the same time, Booking.com needs to defend Airbnb incursions on its own European turf.

Brian Chesky's $120 million stock grant may rankle many, but he's pledging to contribute $100 million of it to a host endowment fund.

It's never any fun when companies are reluctant to speak ill of competitors. But, when it comes to wooing hosts, little Vrbo believes it needs to explicitly tell hosts what it can do that giant Airbnb can't. The pitch may be useful in attracting a segment of hosts.

Airbnb sees recruiting new hosts as vital to its future growth but it hasn't reversed a significant decline in its ranks. Macroeconomic trends will likely reverse the trend, but the competition to win hearts and listings is getting intense.

Midway through 2020, Expedia Group and its Vrbo short-term rental unit took the high road by not wanting to appear to be taking advantage of host anger at Airbnb's early-pandemic refund policies. But when your new host recruitment plan targets "superhosts," it's clear those calculations are long gone.

Airbnb's stealthy financing and leadership of supposedly grassroots host clubs around the world to pursue the short-term rental giant's advocacy agenda may be an effective tactic, but it furthers a false narrative about the nature of the company, and it is a blotch on its reputation.

Airbnb will spend tens of millions of dollars, if not more, on its global advertising and referral campaigns to recruit more hosts, and that's probably a smart move. On the face of it, though, this proves that the company's host sign-up efforts are hardly organic, as one analyst alleged.