Skift Take
This makes perfect, if long overdue, business sense for Airbnb. But can Airbnb really make sure these tools won’t be abused by commercial operators running illegal hotel businesses in cities like San Francisco or New York?
It was only a matter of time before Airbnb began seriously addressing the vacation rental market business —a global market worth an estimated $138 billion in 2016 and expected to grow to a value of $194 billion by 2021.
Skift outlined Airbnb's prospects in vacation rentals earlier this year.
Speaking to an audience of vacation rental management industry executives on Monday in Orlando at the Vacation Rental Management Association's national conference, Airbnb co-founder and chief strategy officer Nathan Blecharczyk announced the debut of a new set of tools created for vacation rental property managers, some of whom manage hundreds or thousands of listings.
These tools, said Jonathan Lesser, Airbnb head of global host and community operations and general manager of vacation rentals, are Airbnb's way of "embracing" the traditional vacation rental market, which is a significant portion of the alternative accommodations space that Airbnb has been slow to incorporate in the past. The tools are currently available to property managers worldwide who manage listings in popular vacation rental markets.
"Our platform was not originally designed for professional hosts in the traditional vacation rental market, yet they are hosts who provide great experiences to guests all around the world," Lesser told Skift. "It was really time we made a statement about embracing them as a community on our platform."
These tools, he said, make it easier for professional vacation rental managers to mange multiple listings, with "expanded pricing and availability settings to match the rules they have in their businesses" and to "improve calendar functionality with the ability to save and create rules set on pricing." They also include tools such as a unified calendar and easy messaging capabilities, Airbnb says.
The new host tools also integrate with more than 70 other existing property management systems already being used by many vacation rental managers. Examples of these partners include Streamline, Live Rez, and Barefoot.
"Professional hosts use systems called property management systems, or PMSs, to manage their inventory, and they like to control all of their functionality from that platform," Lesser said. "It's easier for them and the inventory is more accura
