Don't get us wrong: Expedia, Vrbo and Booking.com will all get mileage out of their in-game or pre-game Super Bowl ads. But they lack breakthrough potential.
Hopper aims to be a big player in short-term rentals, and it's still under development cancel-for-any-reason feature could draw a ton of positive attention from hosts and guests. It could either mean a ton of red ink for Hopper or, if successful, spur competitors to scurry to offer knock-offs.
In Skift's top stories this week, tour operators prepare for Japan to reopen to tourists this year, short-term rental properties in the U.S. become more expensive, and Booking and Expedia develop Super Bowl ads.
Millions more essential workers could be hitting the road in the coming years, thanks to Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. And that’s a lot of bookings for all travel companies, if they're prepared to do their homework early on.
In Skift's top stories this week, Hawaiian Airlines is changing its distribution strategy, Sonder has a disappointing stock market debut, and Hilton unveils its plan to address the labor shortage in the hotel industry.
Airbnb has been a savvy public relations practitioner throughout the years, and the volume of press releases the company churns out annually is legion. Brian Chesky's yearlong digital nomad stint aligns with the company's brand narrative and marketing strategy.
Stock markets, at their best, can be hype killers, and public investors shot down many inflated private company valuations in 2021. This may be a sobering development for IPO and SPAC wannabes in 2022.
HomeToGo has been outracing rivals and disproving doubters. The metasearch brand runs operations efficiently. For example, it offers a subscription model to property managers who list with it, and that model appears to be more consistently profitable than charging traditional pure commissions.
Worth a read, not just to appreciate the transparency into the product-led thinking of a giant, now-iconic company but also to just get inspired by some of these suggestions, and who knows, more startups to come out of these ideas.
Airbnb proved to be more nimble in 2021 than many of its competitors, and is leading the grand online travel experiment in reducing over-reliance on Google.