What made Airbnb significantly outweigh Vrbo and Homeaway
Genuinely curious about the reasons and wanna learn from it. #Airbnb #Homeaway #VRBO
Brand and product ease. I find VRBO still pretty clunky and manual. Lots of old school hosts emailing me paperwork.
Interesting... to me the tech in Airbnb is not super impressive; mostly running a CMS and a data pipeline, and their search is not really working. It’s interesting to learn that doing less worse in tech is already a good moat for them
Its like facebook now, nothing really innovative but most people use it.
Airbnb historically had a lot better prices than vrbo. I've noticed as they've grown they've gotten much worse (to the point where I rarely use it) but at one point there was a lot of bargains on there. I tried vrbo a few times to compare and could never find as good of options.
Vrbo and homeaway is the same shit. And they're vacation rentals not space sharing. So they're not direct competitors. The other thing is VRBO is mostly for the US market. Airbnb is worldwide. Having said that Airbnb is valuated as same as Booking.com is concerning. I think valuation makes sense if it was half of it.
Why didn’t they blur the concept and dabble into space sharing though, I thought it’s not fundamentally different, even if we quibble at database models lol
What’s vrbo and homeaway?
Marketing, money burning
Money burning needs deep money pockets which needs great pitches to VCs which in turn also feels like marketing? Feels like once you have the capital & proper execution, you could direct a self-fulfilling prophecy
Airbnb stock will drop to below $100 in the next 3 months
Even $50-$70 is still a huge success
Vacation rental is just a subset of what Airbnb is doing. For example, have you rented for business travel on VRBO? When a city holds a big conference, usually airbnb will be the only choice to get accommodation at reasonable price.
Super host + Airbnb Plus + Experiences
Airbnb had better marketing from the start and has a wider inventory (e.g. single rooms) that appeal to a younger crowd. Young people liking your product is pretty much free advertising as well. Most listings on Vrbo are also on Airbnb. The same can't be said for the reverse.
Let’s see how the stock holds after 6-8 months.
Even not considering the current stock price, under my impression Airbnb’s traffic is way more than that of Homeaway & VRBO’s