Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight • Hacker News Board

Re: Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight

#221

Post by wenc » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 11:01 PM UTC

throwaway-1283 wrote: post #193

dpandya wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether or not a company is a "tech" company is kind of a muddled question, but taking even a brief glance at https://airbnb.io/ (their engineering blog) makes it clear that AirBnB does some pretty serious engineering. For example, their post about their work in search ranking is quite interesting [1]. [1]: https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/machine-learning-power...

I'm not suggesting they don't have engineering challenges, but if you stack ranked the engineering challenges by difficulty across Airbnb, Uber/Lyft, Google, FB, Netflix, Amazon, Dropbox, Pinterest, etc. I don't see how Airbnb would not very easily rank last by a long shot. Airbnb is basically just a prettier craigslist with a payment transfer mechanism and messaging. It isn't to say it isn't a great business, just t…

Not sure where the threshold between tech and non-tech would be though... Dropbox is just unison on the cloud, Pinterest is just a photos website etc.

Also engineering challenges aren’t always obvious from the consumer facing product. It is true that AirBnB founders have design backgrounds rather than engineering ones, but from what I’ve seen of their engineering and data science work, they would qualify as a tech company in my estimation. They did come up with Apache Airflow which is a well regarded data pipeline management system.

Re: Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight

#222

Post by marinman » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 11:01 PM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #159

throwaway-1283 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely disagree with this analogy. Hotels have their place, and in so many ways they can be superior to a home rental. I am the furthest thing from a luddite, but I personally prefer (as I know many others) hotels to Airbnb. There's a consistency to the hotel product that you can't get with Airbnb that I place a premium on, especially for short or last minute stays. I'm also not really sure why Airbnb is consider…

I honestly question who hotels are for. I'm in the top 2% in income, and I actually prefer staying in a hotel, but they'r e just insanely expensive. Do you mostly stay in hotels for business reasons? Or are you just rolling in money?

I agree with some of the other replies: nowadays, AirBnB rarely has a price advantage once you factor in the extra fees. It still wins in terms of uniqueness, for large groups, if you have kids, want to cook, etc.

Re: Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight

#223

Post by irq11 » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 11:03 PM UTC

dpandya wrote: post #190

throwaway-1283 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely disagree with this analogy. Hotels have their place, and in so many ways they can be superior to a home rental. I am the furthest thing from a luddite, but I personally prefer (as I know many others) hotels to Airbnb. There's a consistency to the hotel product that you can't get with Airbnb that I place a premium on, especially for short or last minute stays. I'm also not really sure why Airbnb is consider…

Whether or not a company is a "tech" company is kind of a muddled question, but taking even a brief glance at https://airbnb.io/ (their engineering blog) makes it clear that AirBnB does some pretty serious engineering. For example, their post about their work in search ranking is quite interesting [1]. [1]: https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/machine-learning-power...

Not to take a stance either way, but pretty much any org will find a way to justify the salaries of the people it employs. It’s neither informative nor surprising that a company that employs lots of engineers will have lots of engineering problems.

The question is: if you sacked everyone but the core team who keeps the trains running, what would happen to the business?

Re: Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight

#224

Post by jorde » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 11:03 PM UTC

HeavenFox wrote: post #31

Those who have used HotelTonight, can you comment on your experience? For me, there have been several rare occasions when I needed a room at last minute, but HotelTonight was never actually cheaper than any other aggregators or booking directly with the hotel. All being equal I vastly prefer booking direct so I get my points and elite benefits. I guess they have a fancy interface, and that's... it? Maybe it's market…

Based on my limited experience, prices seem pretty inline with Google's hotel search but booking experience is much nicer. Last summer I was traveling in Europe and would end up booking a hotel in few seconds and showing up 15min later for my stay. The experience is so much better compared to Booking.com et al which require credit card input, bad websites, enless upsell and dark patterns.

I hope they keep HT as clean as it has been as the regular Airbnb experience is starting to feel like Booking.com; hidden fees and endless fake sense of urgency among other growth tactics.

Re: Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight

#225

Post by ghaff » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 11:10 PM UTC

oh_sigh wrote: post #209

Symbiote wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that was Central London, and the price not particularly high, that wouldn't be especially unusual. Except the bathroom would probably be smaller.

Chelsea, but the NYC one, not the London one.

Same question applies. By point of comparison im rarely paying much under $300/night and often more in Manhattan.

Re: Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight

#226

Post by wenc » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 11:10 PM UTC

louisswiss wrote: post #55

HeavenFox wrote: post #31

Those who have used HotelTonight, can you comment on your experience? For me, there have been several rare occasions when I needed a room at last minute, but HotelTonight was never actually cheaper than any other aggregators or booking directly with the hotel. All being equal I vastly prefer booking direct so I get my points and elite benefits. I guess they have a fancy interface, and that's... it? Maybe it's market…

I use it a lot (several times each month for the past ~3 years). I absolutely love it. - You can trust that the hotels are good enough. Never had a bad experience - Takes - They have their own rewards system which really starts to add up the more you use it - They may never give you the absolute cheapest option available in that city for that night, but you'll get an amazing deal on a higher-quality hotel - My experi…

This. I was stuck in Seoul because I missed my train and needed a hotel for the night. Downloaded HT for the first time, it found me a nice boutique hotel for not very much, and I was booked in less than 5 s (didn’t need to enter any payment info since it supported Apple Pay). The quality of the hotel was excellent even though it was rated Basic on HT.

Re: Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight

#227

Post by justrudd » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 11:10 PM UTC

Joe-Z wrote: post #64

__alias wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you loathe them?

Don't know the GP's intention, but coming from a small tourist-heavy city, it can really fuck with the local housing market and make an already dire situation even worse. Also: What are the rules for flagging on HN? Can people not express opinions here? For reference: GP was expressing worry that she can't use HotelTonight anymore because of not wanting to support AirBnb. Glad nobody needs to read that anymore...?

A Planet Money episode about AirBnB in New Orleans.

TL;DR - good in the beginning when it was residents renting out rooms. Eventually developers and companies bought up vast amounts of housing in iconic neighborhoods, priced out residents, and "destroyed the soul of the neighborhood". New Orleans now doesn't allow AirBnB unless you are physically in the house with the renter.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/28/698763891/epis...

Re: Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight

#228

Post by Gpetrium » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 11:11 PM UTC

crushcrashcrush wrote: post #97

Fantastic product, super concerned about AirBnB acquisition - not because of what they'll do to the product, but I guarantee their partnerships with hotels and hotel groups will evaporate when contracts expire. A hotel working with Airbnb is like BlockBuster working with Netflix to share customer data. The hotels groups aren't as fucking stupid as Blockbuster was, though.

I don't think Airbnb (Netflix) marketplace necessarily covers for some of the benefits a set of clients look for in Hotels (BlockBuster). However, going along with your analogy, I think this move is 2 fold: data driven & marketplace synergy. I believe Airbnb is interested in the data it can get from a model business such as HotelTonight and to be able to cross-connect it to their own. I think their end-goal is to have Airbnb become a one stop shop for not only current users of AirBnB, but also hotel users.

I believe a good portion of large hotels are aware that at some point they will need to tap into the Airbnb market and if that marketplace (Airbnb) manages to create an environment where both sides can live or directly compete with each other, everyone (winners mostly) will be happy with the outcome.

The real tricky part is that synergy can be difficult to have and different players (hotel customers, airbnb customer, hotels, airbnb renters) may have different degrees of resistances to Airbnb plan.

I think their main focus will be to create a B2B environment that will make big ticket customers (e.g. IBM) want to use their system to get either a rented place or a hotel room for their consultants and business travelers. Lots of money to be made in this area.

Re: Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight

#229

Post by stef25 » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 11:11 PM UTC

What's amazing at Airbnb is their ability to make places look so much nicer in the pictures than what they look like in reality.

After staying in a crack house in Barcelona, a dirty dark hole in Manhattan, a "private" villa in France where the owner was screwing an endless stream of boyfriends behind the flimsy kitchen door at 10AM, a thermite infested apartment in Sicily with horrid beds, I still feel like a total asshole when leaving a negative review. I'm not sure why I keep going back to it.

Re: Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight

#230

Post by gregkerzhner » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 11:11 PM UTC

tedmiston wrote: post #216

kenneth wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live out of hotels pretty much full time. Really, it's not as expensive and as bad as you make it seem. My average nightly rate averages out to just slightly above my rent, and I have a lot more flexibility. At the end of this month, I'm ditching my place and going full time, and I'll actually be saving money overall, and I can be anywhere in the world without the feeling of my empty apartment burning a hole in my…

Just curious, how do you handle mail and packages?

I struggled with this a lot in my first few years as a digital nomad, having mail delivered to my parents house, bills often lost, etc... Then someone told me about virtual mailboxes. https://www.postnet.com/virtual-mail/ . You pay 15 bucks a month and they can act like your home address, accepting all your mail. For an additional fee, they can either scan the mail, or forward it physically to wherever you might be at the moment.

To the outside world it looks like your permanent address. I use mine to buy health insurance through Obamacare and also have registered my car to this address.