Short-Term Rental and Vacation Rental News

Stats can provide a snapshot of a business in a way that few other bits of information can.

To some extent, Expedia is molding HomeAway to its liking. Unlike Booking.com (for now, at least), HomeAway is backing off its goal of making all vacation rentals online bookable. Expedia is also adding apartments in urban areas to better compete against Airbnb and Booking.com.

From the looks of it, this new experiment seems like a smart move for Airbnb to test out: it broadens Airbnb's appeal even further to guests who expect or want more hotel-like amenities at an Airbnb, and it helps them compete against other startups that try to offer a more service-oriented home-sharing experience.

An SEIU partnership would have helped Airbnb score brownie points with Americans supporting the Fight for $15. But even if the deal had gone through, it's very doubtful whether Airbnb would have been able to get its hosts to hire unionized cleaners.

Airbnb is on a mission to get legalized and gain more acceptance in cities throughout the U.S. A partnership with one of the nation’s biggest labor unions to encourage hosts to hire cleaners for at least $15 an hour would be the next big step if Airbnb can convince hosts to sign on the usually more expensive unionized labor.

Just as Airbnb has had a transformative impact on the home sharing and vacation rental business, it hopes to do the same by going beyond just offering stays into offering actual travel activities and experiences to its community. It'll be very interesting to see how they do it.

Airbnb is doing all it can to become legalized in cities like New York and Los Angeles by saying it'll pay occupancy taxes, just like hotels do. But if you look at the math and the overall economic impact, is that money really enough to have a positive net impact on those cities?

To say that Newark comes to this fight as the weaker party is an understatement. If the city wants to do more than just collect taxes and begin regulating short-term rentals, however, it might want to take a good look at a recent San Francisco city report that shows just how complicated that endeavor can be.

Does regulating short-term rental platforms like Airbnb really work? Well if Airbnb and its peers would cooperate instead of passing the buck to taxpayers regulation could have a fighting chance.

With its multi-million-dollar investments in Onefinestay, Oasis Collections, and Squarebreak, AccorHotels is taking a smart, strategic approach to battling the encroachment of home-sharing platforms like Airbnb and HomeAway by embracing their direct competitors.