What about renting an apartment specifically for the purpose of putting it up on AirBnB? In San Francisco or NY this could make some money.
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1 million nights booked at Airbnb (YC W09)
41–50 of 54 posts
Re: 1 million nights booked at Airbnb (YC W09)
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mandalay bay does not have 100% occupancy 365 days per year. They probably don't even have 50% occupancy 365 days per year. But yes, it's about the size of a VERY large hotel.
Vegas has very high occupancy rates. Even in the down economy, it's around 80%. http://cber.unlv.edu/tour.html
Wow, impressive! And based on actual data, as opposed to numbers I made up :-)
Re: 1 million nights booked at Airbnb (YC W09)
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vegas has very high occupancy rates. Even in the down economy, it's around 80%. http://cber.unlv.edu/tour.html
Wow, impressive! And based on actual data, as opposed to numbers I made up :-)
Wouldn't be surprised if they tweak their thresholds for comping rooms to fill rooms that would otherwise go vacant.
Re: 1 million nights booked at Airbnb (YC W09)
#44[deleted]
Re: 1 million nights booked at Airbnb (YC W09)
#45We, ahem, tried to book in Vancouver BC, but had a few issues. Since I know the airbnb folks hang out here, I will elaborate: We tried to book a room and found that the slow response time from our candidate people made it impossible to fix up a place in short enough notice.
However, there was something in this process which might have alienated the spouse from airbnb forever (much, much more than the convenience/ time lag factor): We exchanged emails with the airbnb people, who were quite helpful, and in one of them said something like "the owner pulled back from the agreement at the last minute because he lost power from a snowstorm, which is quite reasonable." Or something to that effect. A couple of weeks later, the owner emailed us, basically screaming "why did you post such nasty things about me?" Turns out someone from airbnb had put "the owner pulled back from the agreement at the last minute" onto the owners feedback page, with neither our permission nor any context (like, the power went out because of the snowstorm). My wife emailed airbnb and the comment got pulled, but it didn't leave a great taste in our mouth.
I may not be remembering exactly the exchange, but it was pretty close to that. If you ever want my wife to consider airbnb again, it will probably take some cold hard cash.
Otherwise, I love the idea!
Re: 1 million nights booked at Airbnb (YC W09)
#46Is there some kind of unwritten rule that states any submission with (YC W*) needs to be upvoted straight away? I'm sure if the title was "Hotels.com reaches 1 billion bookings" wouldn't get the same attention. Anyways, congratulations!
If Hotels.com had launched on HN, regularly had founders and employees interact with members here, then I think Hotels.com too would get upvoted similarly when they achieved such feats.
There are so many YC companies that if every YC company was upvoted similarly, there wouldn't be anything but YC coverage on the homepage.
Re: 1 million nights booked at Airbnb (YC W09)
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is an underestimate. They also charge a per-booking transaction to the person booking. It is around $10. Assuming that the average booking is 3-nights that's another $3M.
You're right. I suppose the 3% is meant to just about cover the credit card fees then. E.g. http://www.airbnb.com/rooms/73581 . Click the 'more info' link that's just below the 'Book it' button. It says in tiny print "Excludes Airbnb service fee ($9)". Odd how they're hiding that fee; much worse than the typical hotel website that tries to hide taxes. Airbnb folks, I know you're reading: that instantly changed my imp…
Yes, instead of hiding it under that little 'more info' link they should probably just show it with the room cost, but I wouldn't go so far as to call them sleazy.
I just used them two weeks ago for a trip to SF, and never felt surprised by their service fee during the booking process.
Re: 1 million nights booked at Airbnb (YC W09)
#48My favorite part about their Info Graphic is that is took 11 months from idea to launch. Its also interesting to see the 4 year timespan. So often we can get frustrated by the time our ideas take to reach their goal, but its easy to forget success is hard work and rarely comes overnight. Congrats to the Airbnb.
Not to marginalize these guy's success in any way, but being part of the winter 09 ycombinator class probably helped in a big way (right around time of their major bump)
The YC pedigree probably helped with capital and hiring, but I'm curious how they solved the chicken and egg problem of getting enough rentals to attract enough renters to attract more rentals... etc. Alot of hard work and selling, I imagine.
Re: 1 million nights booked at Airbnb (YC W09)
#49Anyone know what's up with the speed issues? I've been trying to book a room for SXSW for days now & at least from here (CH) the site is unusably slow. Weird since my last experience booking a place in Vienna 5 months ago was great.
Re: 1 million nights booked at Airbnb (YC W09)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to marginalize these guy's success in any way, but being part of the winter 09 ycombinator class probably helped in a big way (right around time of their major bump)
The YC pedigree probably helped with capital and hiring, but I'm curious how they solved the chicken and egg problem of getting enough rentals to attract enough renters to attract more rentals... etc. Alot of hard work and selling, I imagine.
Well don't discount the PR and hype. Reputation plays a huge factor on a service like this. Yes, hard work and persistence is the real factor of this success.