Articles tagged “short-term rentals”

Join us every Friday for our informal Skift team conversations on Clubhouse, happening at 11am ET on Friday, April 2. This week we'll discuss shifts in the short-rentals landscape, Airbnb's road ahead, and what investors might find most compelling.

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.

AvantStay’s expansion to the villa rental market in Mexico is happening at a slower pace than bigger brands like Marriott, but it still signals a lot of future growth in the lodging sector won't be tied to traditional hotels.

Airbnb is going with huge brand marketing campaigns in 2021 to take hosting mainstream. But when travel recovers and rivals turn on their performance marketing on Google, will Airbnb de-prioritizing search engine marketing come back to haunt it?

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said what the company's customers really want are unique stays and experiences offered by individual hosts. That means expanding Airbnb's hotel business doesn't seem to be the priority it once was. And, oh yeah, the proliferation of corporate hosts like Sonder and others, doesn't mesh with what Chesky believes travelers desire.

Is there one little thing that Wall Street is forgetting about the Booking Holdings-Airbnb face-off? Booking Holdings has a huge hotel business and Airbnb doesn't. Booking is certainly lagging in short-term rentals, but CEO Glenn Fogel is probably justified in liking his cards.

Savvy consumers used to searching for hotel stays and seeing how rates change based on alternative dates may be disappointed in this Airbnb feature. That's because it doesn't do precisely that for a specific property. Still, the tweak is a nice twist in short-term rental trip planning.

In this Skift Online Travel and Distribution Summit video we hear from Julie Brinkman, CEO of Beyond Pricing, about how short term rental owners, managers, and key stakeholders can optimize their short term rental distribution strategy for the rapidly changing travel environment of 2021 and beyond.