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Comment by zwieback | Hacker News Reader

and I thought they were struggling because everyone is staying home due to Covid...

I imagine cancellations skyrocketed and bookings halted for a few weeks in the spring, but by summer they started to publicly reveal trends were working in their behavior. The number of bookings was a bit depressed, but the number of nights booked had actually increased. In covid times, people seem to prefer staying in a private home for 1-2 weeks over sharing hallways with other guests at hotels for a few nights. With WFH, you can even relocate to an airbnb for a month or more.

I was going to uncharacteristically rent an AirBnB in January because I wanted my own place I could cook in rather than have to go to restaurants, at least for every meal. (As a base for hiking.) I ended up canceling because the situation is so fluid/crazy but it made more sense than staying in a hotel.

But also due to covid, many people have relocated to temporary accommodation out of the cities - booking through Airbnb. I heard somewhere they saw record bookings in one of the past few months.

Lesson 1: Don't get your financial information from news or social media.

From tesla to bitcoin to anything really, it's amazing how wrong the news and social media have been.

Just not too long ago, the news and social media was saying tesla was overpriced and going to crash. Instead it's gained 10X or more in value.

I also remember not too long ago Tesla's CEO was saying Tesla was overpriced.

They are struggling. They IPO not due to the health of their business, but because so many dupes are putting their dumb money on the table these days.

I assume most investors are smarter than that and are hoping AirBnB will build a monopoly similar to how google did with search and Wikipedia did with online encyclopedias.

A 5% monopoly tax on most rentals/hotels does give you a huge profit eventually.

I really wonder if these monopolies will happen.

Is there any paid service with actual monopoly yet? Amazon has market share, but also competitive prices. To me all of these big markets like taxi, food delivery and online booking seem rather low barrier of entry. And that the customers will be price aware. That can't be really compared with free services like Google, Wikipedia or Youtube...

VISA and Mastercard are close to monopoly there are also debt rating companies that control a market but cannot remember their name.

The optimal shape for most markets is a duopoly. Both competitors get a large enough stake to continue growing, but don't really meaningfully compete, and don't have to worry as much about antitrust.

There are a lot of tremendously unprofitable monopoly plays riding this sort of dream train, particularly since 2008.

Which ones will work and which ones won't is hard to tell, but that is indeed what investors are betting on.

At least Airbnb has a business model that could theoretically make it to profitability. An alarming number of these don't have any coherent path.

I just don't see a monopoly being possible in this space for a variety of reasons. Specifically it doesn't seem politically viable.

I think the interior of America has given up on distancing.

To be fair... you can stay at an airbnb and still be completely distanced from the owner of said airbnb. Yeah, you have to travel, but for many this is also possible without any close contact.

I can't guarantee, but my bet is the majority of people vacationing in Airbnbs aren't being distant. The marginal impact on deaths now is probably lower than it was in March, but only barely.

I’ve stayed in Airbnbs many times (zero since March) and have not even once met my host in person.

I'm not talking about interaction with the host, I'm talking about the general risks of traveling and then going to a new place where you are interacting with the people shortly after traveling.

My claim is that most of these people are not going on exclusively nature-exploration vacations, they are going to see people or to patronize their businesses.

Maybe ease up on the costal holier than thou sentiment. I’m in Miami right now and 90% of the people I’ve met are tech / finance types from NYC doing blow inside of clubs until 4am.

to be fair, that was also Miami pre-pandemic

No doubt, point I’m making is it’s not just folks from red states disregarding government advice.

I was in Texas recently. I'm not going to ease up on it when mask compliance compared to SF or DC (haven't been to NYC) is measurably awful.

> I’m in Miami right now and 90% of the people I’ve met are tech / finance types from NYC doing blow inside of clubs until 4am

I don't even know what this means. 90% of people you've met in Miami do "blow"? What? Are you a coke dealer?

Maybe go out to a high end dinner in Miami and meet people before assuming I’m a drug dealer.

So, I can't criticize the interior of America for generally failing to distance because of some rich finance people you met at a high-end dinner and somehow know their drug habits?

Sorry, I really don't see the relevance to the original claim.

Without any judgment, your sample may be extremely biased...

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