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Airbnb Announces Intention to Become a Publicly-Traded Company During 2020

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Re: Airbnb Announces Intention to Become a Publicly-Traded Company During 2020

#161

Post by jedberg »

cheriot wrote: post #158
jedberg wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is that an externality of AirBnB or poor city planning? I'd say both. Poor city planning leads to it happening, but AirBnB exacerbates the problem. And for a politician, regulating AirBnB is much easier and a lot more understandable by the electorate. Explaining how they should be reelected because of changes they made to fundamental housing policy that will take 30 years to materialize is a hard sell.

It doesn't take 30 years to build new homes. As soon as California forced cities to allow ADUs they were built in large numbers. Add duplexes, three plexes, etc and we'll get even more. The thing about regulating symptoms is that it's cathartic without accomplishing much.

It doesn't take 30 years to build, but it takes 30 years for enough people to sell land and enough builders to buy land and then build to make any difference.

I was reading an article about a city that was upzoned in the 70s which I can't find now, but the gist of it was that everyone was worried the upzoning would change everything. In reality, in the 40 years since, only a few single family homes were torn down and replaced with multi-unit dwellings. Most of the land sales were still from one single family owner to another.

Re: Airbnb Announces Intention to Become a Publicly-Traded Company During 2020

#162

Post by cheriot »

jedberg wrote: post #161
cheriot wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't take 30 years to build new homes. As soon as California forced cities to allow ADUs they were built in large numbers. Add duplexes, three plexes, etc and we'll get even more. The thing about regulating symptoms is that it's cathartic without accomplishing much.

It doesn't take 30 years to build, but it takes 30 years for enough people to sell land and enough builders to buy land and then build to make any difference. I was reading an article about a city that was upzoned in the 70s which I can't find now, but the gist of it was that everyone was worried the upzoning would change everything. In reality, in the 40 years since, only a few single family homes were torn down and…

I think I read the same article (Portland?). The key thing is that the change was slow because demand was building up slowly.

OTOH, if changes are held back for decades and demand is pent up (ie soaring prices and increasing commutes) then there's going to be a surge once changes are allowed. ie SF will see a far bigger, faster change than other places.

It's precisely the places that have a huge pent up demand for housing that have the biggest problem with Airbnb.

Re: Airbnb Announces Intention to Become a Publicly-Traded Company During 2020

#163

Post by mrgordon »

irq11 wrote: post #44
mrgordon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will most likely be a direct listing because Airbnb doesn't need to raise more capital. Its actually about employee liquidity for people waiting 10+ years.

You keep saying this, but you can’t possibly know it unless you have inside knowledge. So either state your source or just say that you’re guessing.

One day later here is a huge NYTimes piece about how the employees were pushing hard for the public offering for years and it caused tensions: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/technology/airbnb-employe...

Re: Airbnb Announces Intention to Become a Publicly-Traded Company During 2020

#164

Post by chrislh »

avar wrote: post #112
baby wrote: post #110

I really really love Airbnb, and I've mostly stayed at Airbnb and ignored hotel in the last 5 years perhaps. I now find hotels dirty, impersonal, and a chore to stay at to be honest. Now, I've become increasingly irritated by Airbnb's pricing tactics. They are blatantly lying to you when it comes to how much you're going to pay. I have two recent examples if you are not used to booking Airbnb: * 99$/night room end up…

AirBnB clearly uses low room rates and high service fees to pull you in, but there's a legitimate reason to display it like that. The cleaning fee is fixed. So maybe you start out thinking you'll stay 5 days, but end up staying 10. If they showed "all inclusive" rates you'd have confusion in the other direction. What you thought was the cheap hotel suddenly isn't because the cleaning fee for the two is very different…

The product I work on has a search experience similar to Airbnb's. We initially made the choice to show all-in prices on the initial search screens. Bookings TANKED. Guests called in to complain why our listings are "more expensive on our own site than Airbnb" (they were cheaper at the end of the day, but we weren't hiding fees).

End of the day, we had to switch to Airbnb's fee-hiding style because users are trained to expect the hidden fees.

Re: Airbnb Announces Intention to Become a Publicly-Traded Company During 2020

#165

Post by baby »

artr wrote: post #157
baby wrote: post #110

I really really love Airbnb, and I've mostly stayed at Airbnb and ignored hotel in the last 5 years perhaps. I now find hotels dirty, impersonal, and a chore to stay at to be honest. Now, I've become increasingly irritated by Airbnb's pricing tactics. They are blatantly lying to you when it comes to how much you're going to pay. I have two recent examples if you are not used to booking Airbnb: * 99$/night room end up…

Airbnb knows exactly what they're doing and will comply with regulation only if it needs to: You'll see different rates on different pages on EU, Australia (where drip pricing is illegal) and USA versions of the site for the same property.

Does browsing Airbnb in France or from France force true prices ?

Re: Airbnb Announces Intention to Become a Publicly-Traded Company During 2020

#166

Post by baby »

Lucadg wrote: post #148
baby wrote: post #110

I really really love Airbnb, and I've mostly stayed at Airbnb and ignored hotel in the last 5 years perhaps. I now find hotels dirty, impersonal, and a chore to stay at to be honest. Now, I've become increasingly irritated by Airbnb's pricing tactics. They are blatantly lying to you when it comes to how much you're going to pay. I have two recent examples if you are not used to booking Airbnb: * 99$/night room end up…

It always shows average prices to me when I insert people and dates, so it probably behaves differently according to users/markets or it does a/b testing.

Interesting. Where are you located? Maybe I can use a VPN to get the same behavior.

Re: Airbnb Announces Intention to Become a Publicly-Traded Company During 2020

#167

Post by vadym909 »

foobandit wrote: post #145
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the opposite and love hotels. If I wanted to clean up after myself like all my Airbnb hosts demand I’d just stay at home. I grew tired of all their demands (stripping all the beds before leaving, really?, washing all dishes, really?) and just started staying in hotels again and never looked back.

I've stayed in ~70 Airbnbs over the last few years and have never gotten those sorts of demands. That seems unreasonable and I'd just ignore them.

I hate airbnbs because they either charge $20 to send someone to pick your garbage or you have to haul garbage publicly and find a place to dump it. I understand it costs money but just build it into your daily rate and don't nickel and dime me for every silly request- additional towels- $5/pop, Early checkin- $50, late checkout- $100. As if all the flights in the world now fly you into and out of city between 11am and 4pm.

Re: Airbnb Announces Intention to Become a Publicly-Traded Company During 2020

#168

Post by meowface »

romwell wrote: post #124
meowface wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found this annoying, but they always show you the total on the initial booking listing (if you've specified the dates and number of people). You know upfront what you're going to pay; there's no bait and switch. It makes searching by nightly price a little more tedious than it should be (search by total would be nice), but I've never felt deceived.

>You know upfront what you're going to pay; there's no bait and switch. The map only displays the nightly price, IIRC. And not being able to filter by total is a hostile UI.

True, the search UI (map + filtering) only shows nightly. But the total is always prominent on each listing page.

Re: Airbnb Announces Intention to Become a Publicly-Traded Company During 2020

#169

Post by avar »

systematical wrote: post #140
earthshot wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The legitimate reason is that momentum causes even frustrated and annoyed people to finish most transactions even after they realize that AirBNB has tricked them about the price. Let's not pretend there's something nobler then that. The whole travel industry is chock full of this bullshit where vendors hide the full price (taxes, resort fees, etc.). It sucks.

Working for an OTA for the last 5 years I can confirm this. Also, stay away from travel insurance, cancellation protection, or whatever else they call it. It's a scam. And yes, as a previous user stated, it's very easy for us developers to include the fees and taxes in the average rate display. Fees are either fixed dollar amounts or a percentage of the room charge. It's trivial to add this into the average rate per…

I work for another OTA, opinions are my own.

Rate parity isn't price fixing, and it's been going on for decades (pre-dates the Internet). The DOJ and EU regulators know about it.

The hotel can price rooms however they want, they then enter into a voluntary contract with an OTA to give them a percent.

If hotels could just consistently give consumers OTA prices minus that percentage directly customers would get savvy to that, and the legitimate service an OTA provides wouldn't be paid for.

It would just lead to shadier forms of advertising for the same service, like the OTA obscuring the name, location etc. of the hotel.

Maybe that'll happen, and maybe we'll be better off as a society. It'll impact a lot more than just OTA's, e.g. Google Adwords displaying a product for $100 when part of that margin is being given to Google.

> Second, they take a massive percentage from hotels as commission. Use Expedia to find availability, but then go direct to the hotel[...]

30% is very high, but if the hotel is voluntarily paying a 30% rate on advertisement that's how much it's worth to them.

Whether that's "fair" or not it's generally a bad deal for the consumer to book directly at the same rate, if something goes sideways they don't have the OTA's bargaining power to help them out.

> They will not put inventory on Expedia during peak seasons.

Good for them, but it seems 30% is worth it in the off-season if they go out of their way to sign-up to pay that.

> In short fuck Expedia and probably AirBnB too.

A hotel that's willing to pay Expedia 30% on X for ads isn't going to be better off with no X at all, which unless they're idiots is the alternative.

You're basically saying "fuck advertisement". Sellers stand to gain from advertising their services to buyers, that's why advertising exists.

Re: Airbnb Announces Intention to Become a Publicly-Traded Company During 2020

#170

Post by systematical »

avar wrote: post #169
systematical wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working for an OTA for the last 5 years I can confirm this. Also, stay away from travel insurance, cancellation protection, or whatever else they call it. It's a scam. And yes, as a previous user stated, it's very easy for us developers to include the fees and taxes in the average rate display. Fees are either fixed dollar amounts or a percentage of the room charge. It's trivial to add this into the average rate per…

I work for another OTA, opinions are my own. Rate parity isn't price fixing, and it's been going on for decades (pre-dates the Internet). The DOJ and EU regulators know about it. The hotel can price rooms however they want, they then enter into a voluntary contract with an OTA to give them a percent. If hotels could just consistently give consumers OTA prices minus that percentage directly customers would get savvy t…

"Voluntary" give me a break. Do you actually believe what you're typing? If so, that is an impressive spell you've placed yourself under. The large OTAs have such a large share of the market that there is nothing voluntary about using them. It's list your hotel with us or go out of business. And when you have that clout, you can then say, and don't try listing prices on your website that are lower than ours or we will de-list you.

Explain how that is not price-fixing at worst, and not shady at best?

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