I hear a lot of talk surrounding their "moat" and many skeptics are questioning whether or not they will be able to maintain their competitive advantage. However, it feels like Airbnb has solved a truly hard problem: how to make people trust your service. People are using this app to go stay in random people's homes. How often do you hear people talk about being murdered in uber? I still hear it. How often do you hea…
I've rented a lot of homes with VRBO and never had any bad experiences. In my use-case I don't see what AirBnb offers over VRBO.
I hear a lot of talk surrounding their "moat" and many skeptics are questioning whether or not they will be able to maintain their competitive advantage. However, it feels like Airbnb has solved a truly hard problem: how to make people trust your service. People are using this app to go stay in random people's homes. How often do you hear people talk about being murdered in uber? I still hear it. How often do you hea…
I've had better experiences with VRBO than AirBnB
Same, it's been great. I've mostly used it for renting large homes in Tahoe.
I recall that Facebook's first day closed at or near the offer price: Opened at $38 and closed at $38.23. That's a masterful IPO pricing accomplishment, meaning, FB left $0.23 per share on the table. Moreover, the stock traded below the open for 5 quarters before starting it's impressive rise. Even with that pause, buying at the open and holding till now would have yielded nearly 27% annualized return. It's just my o…
This was the second largest "money left on the table" from an IPO. Jay Ritter's document shows how much AirBNB could have picked up if they had priced their IPO appropriately.
Airbnb is great until you get a bad experience. For hotels, there is a floor for bad experiences - it can only get so bad, and the customer service is usually decent. I used airbnb until I had a single terrible experience and worse customer service that did not help me because I had no proof of the incident. Been using hotels ever since.
They will churn through new customers who get bitten by this until they come up with controls/features that prevent it. Instituting those will increase the price making them less competitive and opening the door to others.
Its quite amusing how much the gig economy is hyped up but besides the initial surge of excitement, it just settles down and looks like the industry its trying to replace.
But I'm a pessimist. Maybe they will use the infusion of cash to invest in something truly groundbreaking. But I'm staying far far away from making any investments in them.
> Ugly - Alot of owners now are pulling a perfectly legal scam of listing a place at a certain price point and then charging an extremely high cleaning fee. When booking it, you are then shocked by the extreme fees, one place (5 days stay) was charging $400 for their cleaning fee. I'm not sure I follow here, the cleaning fee is announced before you confirm the booking isn't it? In a way it's similar to airlines havin…
> seat-choosing fee, bagage fee Those are optional, cleaning fees are not. They should be included in the price shown on the map.
> They should be included in the price shown on the map.
Completely agree, that would make the experience more user-friendly for the person looking to rent.
This is an AirBnb platform issue, not necessarily a owner "scam".
Not a trivial engineering problem as the dynamic price based on length of your stay can't be cached easily as base-price-per-night, and I assume caching prices per listing is what makes the map quick to load and responsive, but it'd be a welcome change!
I recall that Facebook's first day closed at or near the offer price: Opened at $38 and closed at $38.23. That's a masterful IPO pricing accomplishment, meaning, FB left $0.23 per share on the table. Moreover, the stock traded below the open for 5 quarters before starting it's impressive rise. Even with that pause, buying at the open and holding till now would have yielded nearly 27% annualized return. It's just my o…
So what happened to the Dutch Auction idea? Seems that tech is more powerful / autonomous in some ways than Wall St. now and could eliminate this risk? Why subject themselves to this process -- what are they gaining?
Instead of letting the underwriter dish out shares to favored institutions, Google held a Dutch auction in which everyone who wanted a share put in a bid. The lowest successful bid became the price that everyone got their shares at, even if they bid a higher amount. This method guarantees that the initial offering price is set to sell all of the shares at a price that conservatively reflects market demand.
> seat-choosing fee, bagage fee Those are optional, cleaning fees are not. They should be included in the price shown on the map.
> They should be included in the price shown on the map. Completely agree, that would make the experience more user-friendly for the person looking to rent. This is an AirBnb platform issue, not necessarily a owner "scam". Not a trivial engineering problem as the dynamic price based on length of your stay can't be cached easily as base-price-per-night, and I assume caching prices per listing is what makes the map qui…
This is not a platform issue, it is done on purpose to deceive the customer, especially the less tech- or financially savvy customers.
People have been complaining about the cleaning fee ridiculousness forever. Airbnb could and should limit the total allowable cleaning expenses (for type of house, room, location etc., in one word: localization), but they don't do it because it would decrease revenue, not because of technical difficulties, please.
> seat-choosing fee, bagage fee Those are optional, cleaning fees are not. They should be included in the price shown on the map.
> They should be included in the price shown on the map. Completely agree, that would make the experience more user-friendly for the person looking to rent. This is an AirBnb platform issue, not necessarily a owner "scam". Not a trivial engineering problem as the dynamic price based on length of your stay can't be cached easily as base-price-per-night, and I assume caching prices per listing is what makes the map qui…
The base price could be cached and then multiplied by the number of nights plus the cleaning fee before the map is rendered. I can't imagine that would be too expensive to calculate on the front end.
I recall that Facebook's first day closed at or near the offer price: Opened at $38 and closed at $38.23. That's a masterful IPO pricing accomplishment, meaning, FB left $0.23 per share on the table. Moreover, the stock traded below the open for 5 quarters before starting it's impressive rise. Even with that pause, buying at the open and holding till now would have yielded nearly 27% annualized return. It's just my o…
Doesn’t the market play a role as well? Back in 2013 or whenever FB IPOd, things in tech stocks were a bit less crazy than everything right now. So could they really expect it to close at $140?