Airbnb News

For travel companies, the key to personalizing the offline travel experience is collecting as much personal information as possible from the customer online.

While it's pretty clear that the hotel industry and Airbnb are at odds with one another, it's still obvious that more transparent data is sorely needed to understand the true impact of Airbnb and other home sharing platforms on cities and communities.

Airbnb's business model, which includes a traveler-booking fee, wouldn't be competitive when competing for hotel-room bookings against Expedia and Booking.com, a new report argues. But business models aren't set in stone the last time we checked.

The hotel race in Cuba is officially on.

Many U.S. cities remain relatively problematic for short-term rentals as 38 of the 59 largest U.S. cities part of this study have no legal foundation for short-term rentals and 32 have restrictions in place.

One of the reasons HomeAway thought it would be in its interests to get acquired is that it faced substantial risks in transitioning to an online bookable platform and tacking on a fee that travelers have to pay. Now it has Expedia's marketing muscle and tech skills to support all the changes, and a tested product official to help lead the effort.

We're surprised that U.S. hotel chains did not have a stronger global showing, but we're not surprised by Trivago and Airbnb's strength.

High travel costs and an uncertain global economy aren't good news for those expecting businesses to spend more on travel.

Whether official or unofficial, the recent studies of Airbnb activity are revealing more and more about the business happening on Airbnb.

There's a lot of work that goes into matching hundreds of conference attendees with hundreds of local residents who want to cook for them. But as international food-sharing platforms fine-tune their systems, this could be something that scales significantly based simply on growing attendee awareness and demand.