Airbnb News

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said what the company's customers really want are unique stays and experiences offered by individual hosts. That means expanding Airbnb's hotel business doesn't seem to be the priority it once was. And, oh yeah, the proliferation of corporate hosts like Sonder and others, doesn't mesh with what Chesky believes travelers desire.

Is there one little thing that Wall Street is forgetting about the Booking Holdings-Airbnb face-off? Booking Holdings has a huge hotel business and Airbnb doesn't. Booking is certainly lagging in short-term rentals, but CEO Glenn Fogel is probably justified in liking his cards.

Savvy consumers used to searching for hotel stays and seeing how rates change based on alternative dates may be disappointed in this Airbnb feature. That's because it doesn't do precisely that for a specific property. Still, the tweak is a nice twist in short-term rental trip planning.

Will Airbnb continue on its magic carpet ride after it reports its first earnings as a public company? Does the Airbnb brand beat Booking Holdings' real-world businesses, including hotels, flights and metasearch? Or has the market already decided that question?

In this Skift Online Travel and Distribution Summit video we hear from Julie Brinkman, CEO of Beyond Pricing, about how short term rental owners, managers, and key stakeholders can optimize their short term rental distribution strategy for the rapidly changing travel environment of 2021 and beyond.

In Skift's top travel stories this week, we covered Hilton's red ink, the passing of Marriott's Arne Sorenson, Tripadvisor's new subscription plan, hotel openings in Asia, and South Africa's historic equity fund.

Profit, revenue and trends became less relevant during the pandemic so many travel businesses with deeper pockets used the standstill to rethink their strategies. Plenty of the new efforts will fail, but on the other side of the crisis, some of these businesses will look significantly different.

Airbnb felt the heat in 2019, pre-Covid, when it leaned into performance marketing on Google, and didn't get the results it hoped to achieve. In its first major campaign of 2021, Airbnb is mounting a global branding advertising blitz on YouTube (owned by Google) and television in five countries. The campaigned is geared toward expanding the ranks of hosts.

Expedia has no plans to spin off whole-home site Vrbo following Airbnb's blockbuster IPO. Instead, the company is doubling down on expanding the site through its various channels amid a strong pandemic vacation rental market.

Arne Sorenson was a maverick in his own way. He quietly visited Airbnb headquarters in 2014 to get a better understanding of short-term rentals, which culminated in Marriott's Homes & Villas. And he found a way to have a mutually beneficial relationship with those "evil" online travel agencies.