Airbnb News

Peter Kern is correct that Expedia Group currently offers broader travel services than do Airbnb and Booking Holdings, but whether Expedia can gain ground on its rivals and can execute on its strategy are entirely different questions.

While you have to toss out Covid-ravaged 2020 as any kind of a barometer for a company's trajectory, during the last two-and-a-half years, Airbnb has only made a profit during its third quarters. If remote working becomes entrenched in coming years, then that can indeed help with Airbnb's seasonality issues.

Airbnb is indeed showing strength, but is its hubris about leading the travel recovery a bit overblown?

Cruise ships turned into floating harbingers of doom during the pandemic. Now they have a chance to reposition themselves for the remote working boom.

Business school students can probably debate this question endlessly and there would be merit in either position: Should smaller companies copy their larger rivals or vice versa? In the Google era, marketing power often wins the day — but differentiation still counts.

Prepare to dive into the psyche of a digital nomad.

Vrbo was leaving money on the proverbial table by sticking with whole homes. That seems to be changing, but it remains to be seen how far Vrbo will meander into hotels and other inventory types.

Did Airbnb, Booking Holdings, Tripadvisor, Oyo, and Marriott, among others, squirm a bit upon learning of Chinese regulators' latest antitrust crackdowns, this time against ridesharing giant Didi and food-delivery and hotel booker Meituan? If not, they should.

Expedia's Vrbo isn't a global Airbnb killer, nor does it have to be. Vrbo will pick its spots, but that will be a disappointment to those hosts, frustrated and angry with Airbnb, who are looking for some company to take Airbnb down a peg.

Some sectors will feel the labor shortfall versus surging travel demand more acutely than others. Solutions will be complex — and protracted.