What Did You Buy Today?

[crimsonghost747]

(12-09-2020, 08:41 AM)Otter Wrote: What we (me, wife, friends we travel with during non-pandemic years) like about Airbnb is the broad geographic footprint, the filters that allow us to customize what we want in accommodations (hot tub, parking, laundry facilities, etc.), and the fact that it is not a hotel. 

Good luck finding a hotel chain that covers all those bases (there aren't any). 
As to the stay experience/customization, we can typically pick the exact neighborhood we want to stay in. 

If you stick to one hotel chain, then indeed your options are pretty limited. Personally I tend to avoid those like the plague. If you just open, say booking.com, you will find probably find tens of hotels in the exact area where you want to go to. Booking.com and Agoda together have been enough for me to find accommodation almost everywhere I've been to. Some of the really remote areas in Armenia and Georgia might have been the only exception, there it was purely about asking the driver to find a place and he would drop you off at someone's door who had an extra bed. Not sure if airbnb would have worked there... my guess is no.

Both of the above do also offer "alternative" accommodations, such as rooms, apartments, villas etc. (this is a fairly new thing with them, obviously in response to the popularity of airbnb) I chose the Guatemala link you posted by random out of the 4. Booking.com has 5 or 6 similar looking properties within a few hundred meters of that location.

And I definitely agree with you, what I really liked about airbnb is that it's not a hotel. But in recent times, a lot of the airbnb's that I have stayed in have been pretty much like hotels. Might be because usually I stay in 1 bedroom apartments. I really miss those days when it was full of people putting up their apartment for a couple of weeks while they are away, it truly was a different feeling back then.

Airbnb certainly has it's uses. But it has moved on from the "friendly and casual" style and affordable prices and adopted a much more corporate feel. I'm afraid this puts it right next to the hundreds of other accommodation booking websites.

If you compare it to say Booking holdings (BKNG) which has a market cap of $88 billion. That comes at a P/E of over 60. (pretty high, right? Then again it is 2020 and the travel sector has been hammered) It has been profitable since 2005. Made about as much profit as airbnb had revenue in 2019. It looks to be the clear market leader when it comes to accommodation and is well diversified within the travel sector. (hotel booking, car rental, flight search engines etc.)
Airbnb is aiming for a valuation of $40-ish billion at the IPO. BKNG might look overvalued but what does that make Airbnb?