Short-Term Rental and Vacation Rental News

Airbnb likely sees how flights are driving Booking Holdings' connected-trip vision. The timing is unclear, but it needs flights if it wants to be a true "travel concierge."

In 2018, Airbnb had a "superguest" loyalty plan in the works to reward frequent guests with premium benefits, but it never came to be. Might the loyalty benefits being tested resurrect some of those plans?

There is absolutely no doubt that eventually Airbnb will take on Booking.com head-on in homes and hotels. But then what will set the two rivals apart?

The Vacasa acquisition may be executing on paper, but governance shifts at the top are creating unease among franchisees. In a franchise model, perception and confidence can matter as much as financial restructuring.

In an era when speed to market is a given, Chesky is arguing that nice and easy does it will win the day. It would be better to say, "We are behind in our AI development, but we are confident that we will get to where we need to be."

Kindred's challenge is to help take home-swaps from a niche market into a more mainstream product.

Short-term rentals are no longer a frontier business. Outside of a small group of disciplined operators, the sector has settled into a slow, operational grind that favors local execution over national ambition.

Those invested in the current model aren’t happy when we point out a simple truth: The magic of short-term rentals has been professionalized out of existence.

Consider Airbnb's partnership with CookUnity an experiment to see if there is a market for such services.

Airbnb’s struggle to translate technology into better stays mirrors the broader sector’s problem — digital scale without physical control limits how innovative short-term rentals can be.