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Comment by venantius | Hacker News Reader

The main thing is that Airbnb has a global economy of scale - having more hosts in Japan actually does benefit their guests who reside in New York year-round. Competitors to Airbnb similarly must achieve global scale in order to compete in a serious way. There are one or two meaningful exceptions (China, possibly the US domestic market), but essentially any Airbnb competitor must achieve global scale in order to be a serious threat.

By contrast, Uber has to fight to win each city, and most of its users will use Uber for the most part within that city. Adding more drivers to Tokyo does not have a meaningful impact on the resident of New York.

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Why not? A New Yorker who visits Japan needs a ride around town as much as they need housing? Ok, maybe not quite as much. But they do benefit.

But the New Yorker knows that AirBNB is the place to find their place in Tokyo, with few non-hotel alternatives. When you got to Tokyo, even if you don't have Uber installed, you will find a cab.

That is a good point. But presumably most of Uber's revenue comes from the residents of a city who are in town most of the time. Opening up in a new city doesn't benefit Uber as much as it does Airbnb where all properties are accessible options to all of its users.

It’s not nothing, but the difference is at least an order of magnitude.

Consider: I am probably 0% likely to book an Airbnb in my own city. Almost all of my Airbnb’s will be somewhere else, so I only really care about remote stock.

By contrast, something like 90%+ of my Uber rides are going to be local. In many of the places I might travel to, I don’t need Uber at all (the location is rural/suburban, the public transit system is cheap and effective, cabs are widely available, etc).

Ehh. I rarely Uber in my home city and practically all my business is when I travel.

Especially internationally. If I’m in a country that doesn’t speak my language but they have uber, you better believe I’m ubering left and right.

I think those competitors at a global scale already exist in the form of the big hotel booking sites like agoda/booking.com, they have the global scale and global customer volume to directly compete with airbnb in this space and for them it's just adding another offering that compliments the offering they already have.

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