Dennis' Online Travel Briefing

The death of hotels was greatly exaggerated. Advantage Booking.com and Expedia — not Airbnb — if travelers indeed are now seeking out both hotels and vacation rentals in comparable numbers.

Airbnb has bigger concerns than the scenario of one more big city, Chicago, that is potentially tightening its short-term rental restrictions. But such an action certainly wouldn't help.

When it comes to brainstorming, there's no substitute for a Skift reporter ambling over to a Skift Research analyst's desk, and shooting the breeze about Oyo's model, or looking over a shoulder to view on screen how Expedia's marketing spend is trending. That dynamic is really tough to replicate on Zoom.

As a public company, Airbnb would be a dream for reporters, analysts, and investors because of the required disclosures about financials and strategy. It could also prompt competitors to up their game, and perhaps be more forthcoming about the numbers behind their own short-term rental businesses.

With parent company Alphabet generating $79 billion in revenue in the first half of 2020, Google is relentlessly rolling out new travel products. Not to mention, it is dictating content-licensing and advertising terms to cash-strapped partners while a pandemic rages. Enough said.

Sometimes CEO views of where online travel is headed seem more about the capabilities of their companies than anything else. Will pandemic-induced travel preferences make for dominant trends five or 10 years from now? Highly doubtful.

Deep-pocketed Google clearly didn't appease suffering travel advertisers in any meaningful way because it didn't have to — it's Google. Don't look for Google to find religion in terms of being a more collaborative partner perhaps until regulators would take it down a peg.