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Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight

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Re: Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight

#371

Post by yeahitslikethat »

jonknee wrote: post #172
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If an Airbnb is a lot cheaper there is going to be a reason, often it's location. I tend to move around and the ridiculous cleaning fees for Airbnb make it a non-starter. I'm flying to San Diego tomorrow and Hotel Tonight has several nice looking choices at around $100 a night (~$120 with taxes and fees). I just looked at Airbnb and I can get a studio apartment in a similar area for $79 a night which seems like a ste…

I like how you find a place that's $89/night and by the time it's booked you're paying $600 for a weekend.

Re: Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight

#372

Post by shereadsthenews »

ulfw wrote: post #323
shereadsthenews wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really seems to depend on the city. For about $100/night in Zurich I stayed once in a huge top floor flat and once in a bedroom with private bath in a giant palace with plenty of room to entertain dozens, which I did. My company's negotiated hotel rate was $425/night and I pocketed the balance. In NYC all of the Airbnb inventory is bedbug-ridden hovels. Perhaps this simply reflects the housing stock of the region.

What kind of company pays YOU 425USD regardless of the price of the accomodation where you stay? Genuinely curious. All I’ve ever seen is (in your case) “you can expense per night up to 425USD”

At that particular company at that time you could bank the difference between actual spending and allowance and either spend it on travel in a different way (such as airfare upgrades), donate 100% it to designated charities, or cash out a fraction of it at the end of the year.

Re: Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight

#373

Post by sizzle »

stef25 wrote: post #229

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 a…

"a thermite infested apartment in Sicily"

I sometimes wish I could use thermite against some infestations... wouldn't be surprised if cockroaches evolved to survive that too.

Re: Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight

#374

Post by Roedou »

blakeley wrote: post #337
Roedou wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely varies. In NYC, I stayed in a 4000sqft Chelsea apartment, with a private bathroom, grand piano and incredible art, for $125 a night. It does depend on more than just the city.

There’s no chance this is true. Please share the listing

There's every chance this is true. Except I just checked the listing, and it's now $181.

Re: Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight

#375

Post by bertil »

toephu2 wrote: post #324
bertil wrote: post #176

It’s interesting that no one here, after 160 comments, is speculating about the impact to Booking.com B. is the 7th largest internet company in the world but because it’s in Amsterdam and not US based, hardly anyone think about them. They have incredible technology, often on-par with the big ones but I’m not anyone here could name one problem where they pionnered a solution. Disclaimer: I used to work for one of thei…

Is hotels.com related to them in any way?

Not that know of.

Re: Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight

#377

Post by bertil »

pjc50 wrote: post #353
pastor_elm wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my favorite part about Booking is that it will tell me how many other people are currently looking at the last available room i'm looking it. Let's me know if i have to swoop it up quickly!

I'd always assumed that was a lie. To me, the most useful feature of Booking is the refundability of most of their reservations, so I don't have to book hotel and flights simultaneously.

I can confirm (like smueller1234) that it is a real number (within reason on data flowing and estimates) which is actually a surprisingly hard engineering feat to achieve.

I have heard several other sites where the number is a lot more… interpretative.

Re: Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight

#378

Post by bertil »

cmod wrote: post #267
pastor_elm wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my favorite part about Booking is that it will tell me how many other people are currently looking at the last available room i'm looking it. Let's me know if i have to swoop it up quickly!

This is nothing if not a dark pattern, and I would be very suspicious of what metric triggers "looking at the room"

There are several copies, and one is explicitly that: they have loaded the same page recently. There are other copies, like rooms remaining, the recent slope of bookings is steep and will hit zero soon, etc. All are reasonably true.

Re: Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight

#379

Post by bertil »

aboutruby wrote: post #183
bertil wrote: post #176

It’s interesting that no one here, after 160 comments, is speculating about the impact to Booking.com B. is the 7th largest internet company in the world but because it’s in Amsterdam and not US based, hardly anyone think about them. They have incredible technology, often on-par with the big ones but I’m not anyone here could name one problem where they pionnered a solution. Disclaimer: I used to work for one of thei…

Completely disagree on the technology part, everything being written in Perl doesn't help and the user experience is not as good as Airbnb. The main thing going for them is that they have basically every hotel on their platform. And like others mentioned, that a lot of people prefer hotels to airbnbs.

I can’t and I won’t comment on that larger part of the code base, but I suspect that you are right. (I did leave the company after all.)

Having every hotel on the planet requires some very heavy-handed growth teams and they have impressive talent there. It also requires to develop very flexible solutions and, even of the main code-base has some problem, that flexibility is worth mentioning.

There are three areas where I’ve seen some world-class internal products (on par with what I’ve seen at Facebook): data engineering, A/B testing, Machine learning hosting and serving. I’ve asked them to open-source and started what I could to help them do that, but they are far from being able to do it.

Re: Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight

#380

Post by bertil »

traek wrote: post #276
bertil wrote: post #176

It’s interesting that no one here, after 160 comments, is speculating about the impact to Booking.com B. is the 7th largest internet company in the world but because it’s in Amsterdam and not US based, hardly anyone think about them. They have incredible technology, often on-par with the big ones but I’m not anyone here could name one problem where they pionnered a solution. Disclaimer: I used to work for one of thei…

> B. is the 7th largest internet company in the world By what measure? Just checked and it's not market cap, not revenue, not number of employees, and not earnings.

I just googled “largest internet companies” and a list popped up with ‘Priceline’ in 7th, so it was a year-old list. I would agree it’s a vague statement but they are much larger and more interesting than most people suspect.
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