Airbnb's Resurgence | Hacker News Reader

Airbnb's Resurgence

axios.com

11 pointsfab1an6 comments

This reads like a PR piece with some weird metrics: "AirBnB spending" and "based on a panel of spending data including more than 65,000 Airbnb transactions". What is that? The Y-axis is an index, not a metric with units. And why compare to one hotel chain? The linked analysis is not better, although it compares to 3 hotel chains. I am not sure that AirBnB's main competition is business hotels like Merriot, Hilton and Intercontinental, though.

Just tell us the revenues. Are they up or down? Bookings?

They're not saying Airbnb is bigger than Marriott, they're just comparing the performance of both against last year.

Also, Marriott is the world's largest hotel group by a wide margin. After the Starwood merger, there are thirty (!) different brands in their portfolio and their offerings run the gamut from 5 star luxury (Ritz-Carlton, St Regis, Bulgari etc) to 2-star-ish (Fairfield Inn, Towneplace).

https://skift.com/2016/09/21/every-one-of-marriotts-30-hotel...

This article is rather premature. With the 2nd wave beginning to hit across the world, and some places where the first wave has not yet begun to crest, we can expect that the trends noted by this article are noise rather than signal.

I spent all summer traveling across Europe and staying at AirBnBs or with hosts on other hospitality-exchange platforms. I met a lot of other travelers on the road and some touristic spots were packed. There appeared to already be widespread corona fatigue; people just stopped caring about the virus and were willing to travel nevertheless. Yes, some countries imposed border restrictions and quarantine requirements, but those really only affect people flying directly from country X to country Y, while for overlanders it was trivial to evade those restrictions.

Ordinarily I wouldn't have used AirBnb so much, but if ordinary establishments in various towns had already chosen to close for the long term due to corona, AirBnb suddenly seemed like an attractive prospect. So, I can see the company doing well even with a second wave, unless (something which I feel is unlikely in many places) governments re-institute a hard lockdown even in the face of public corona fatigue and resistance.

Well, I agree on seeing some signs of Corona fatigue myself: I spent a long weekend in Prague and basically nobody were taking precautions (in a couple of museums I asked if I had to keep my mask on and the answer was "well, if you want, no problem for us, but it is not mandatory").

Guess what? Two weeks later Prague area has been declared a Red Zone (at least for Germany) so if you want to travel there you must quarantine when you are back.

Again, quarantine restrictions are trivial to evade for people traveling overland. I would be surprised if even 10% of such leisure travelers were properly observing quarantine when they returned home or when they moved on from a "red zone" area to another place on their travel itinerary.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com