Is Airbnb Hotelier’s Friend or Foe?
Digital Marketing in Hospitality
— 14 experts shared their view



Professor of Strategy at University of South Australia Business School
Despite its powerful outward appearance, Airbnb needs the hotel industry much more than hotels need Airbnb. Access to suitable supply is the key success factor for any Platform business. This is particularly true in travel, as demand for a particular moment in time cannot easily be deferred to a later date and needs to be serviced immediately or else it is lost. see more

Adjunct Professor NYU Tisch Center for Hospitality and Hospitality & Online Travel Tech Consultant
Airbnb is an intermediary focused on private accommodations first, hotel accommodations second, which is the exact opposite to the major OTAs. Via Airbnb, the hotel industry loses over $1 billion a year to private accommodations. It is a matter of simple supply and demand: by adding 10%-15% to the supply side, Airbnb takes 10%-15% from the travel demand side, which directly affects hotel ADRs, Occupancy and RevPARs. see more

Founder, Reknown
Make no mistake, Airbnb is not a hotelier's friend. A potential distribution partner, perhaps, but if the company's dealings to date with local governments and the hotel industry are any indication, relationships between hotels and Airbnb will be as contentious and codependent as relationships between hotels and OTAs. see more

Co-founder and CEO, Kalibri Labs, LLC
From the time they announced they were pursuing boutique hotel inventory in March 2018, Airbnb's intentions became obvious. Just as Expedia and Booking.com have to diversify into short term rental, Airbnb has to add hotels. Growth rates are critical if they want to IPO and their penetration in vacation rental cannot maintain the meteoric rise with head-on competition from the OTAs. Pushback from tax and safety regulations in major markets has been another persistent headwind. see more

Associate Professor in Marketing at Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL)
AirBnB is clearly a phenomenon that is disrupting the hospitality industry as we know it. I am not sure if this can be classified as a “friend or foe” but to me it is clear that the dramatic rise of this type of lodging should pose some real questions to hoteliers. Flat renting has been there forever and several players were there also before AirBnB. So: why AirBnB is having more traction into the market and what are the things hoteliers could learn by the rapid growth of it? see more

Partner at Soler & Associates
Looking at competition from the standpoint of how it is hurting profits is never a great way to look at it. That rates can't be raised is a good thing for guests. The question of the acquisition and Airbnb's intention is: what can it bring to the customer. More choice is a good thing. Hotels also need to understand what is appealing to guests in apartments and try to emulate that. If it is just price then we know where this is going. Airbnb blending the categories might be good. It will commodities beds. But Booking is already doing that and hotels still sell. For OTAs and distributors, hotels are always better. Because with the same ad budget they can sell dozens of rooms. Whereas an apartment can only be sold once. The accommodations category is evolving beyond hotels.

Managing Director Hotel Mogel Consulting Limited
Adam Smith (1723-1790) is known as the Father of Economics. In his book entitled The Wealth of Nations (1776) he defined the Law of Supply and Demand. In short form: Prices fall when demand exceeds supply. Now let's take Airbnb adding some (at time of writing) six million rooms into global inventory. Ask yourself, has tourism and business demand for rooms increased by this much in the past decade, noting full well that traditional room stock has also increased? The answer clearly is no. Demand has not increased sufficiently to absorb this new inventory. Therefore, following this economic theory, prices have fallen. I must therefore conclude that any factor that reduces our industry's prices is a foe.

Associate Professor at The Collins College of Hospitality Management
Airbnb adds a tremendous amount of room inventory to the market, mainly in the top tourist destinations. Regardless the fact that hosts on Airbnb gain some advantages over hoteliers as there are fewer compliances a host must follow, there occurs a loss of revenue for the hotel industry every time when a traveler stays in an Airbnb or any room-sharing facility instead of a hotel room. In a nutshell, hosts on Airbnb not only gain advantages over hoteliers in operations, but they also take away real business from hotels. see more

Director at Revenue by Design
Probably both. In many cases the local experience that Airbnb users seek simply can't be replicated by hotels. This is evidenced by many hotels trying to replicate that experience, even going to the extent of removing the word hotel from their name. Whilst hotels report a softening of demand in areas of high Airbnb penetration, assessments of share of demand indicate that Airbnb is tapping into an alternative type of customer. If anything, AirBnb has forced hotels to up their game and re-think what it means to be a hotel typically scoring high on areas such as location, guest services and amenities. A hotel can always go the extra mile to make the guest feel more comfortable and increasingly more secure – it's not always easy to call a taxi from the home of a stranger in a country that doesn't speak the same language as you. However, as the company diversifies into alternative accommodation verticals their influence on the sector will grow.

Assistant Professor at Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne
Airbnb broke the 'boundary' between the accommodation and the hotel industries by focusing travellers on what they need is a place to sleep, not a hotel room. Airbnb, as a relatively new supplier of beds, works harder to better understand travellers and, as a consequence, travellers are willing to tolerate the inconvenience of waiting to be approved, and dragging their luggage to find their Airbnb. How many hotel brands have this power? see more

Co-Founder at TRAVHOTECH
My view is that it's not a simple topic and there are several aspects to consider. 1 - On moving in to hotel space, this is a natural progression when tracking all of the existing OTA's. Over time all of the third party players will broaden their capabilities into other markets, although all will be secondary to search engine powered travel platforms such as Google. From a customer perspective it makes sense to offer the AirBNB customer a hotel option when they need it rather than having them use an alternate path to a booking. see more

Airbnb's mission statement above creates a sense of belonging and so from a hoteliers perspective, if they can create this type of emotional response from those who use Airbnb, they should definitively be seen as a foe. Irrespective of the distribution angle that has many hoteliers feeling wary and extremely vulnerable, it is the essence of how Airbnb is trying to differentiate itself from the hotel industry that should create the greatest amount of fear for your average GM.
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It really doesn't matter if AirBnB is a friend of foe, it is here, it is successful and it resonates with consumers who are looking for a different type of accommodation. The private accommodation industry has been around for ages, what AirBNB and others have done is to make it accessible for more people than ever before. This segment of the industry clearly serves an unmet need of consumers: People who are looking for more space, stay longer, pay less and don't care about the uncertainties of staying in apartments or rooms. see more

Airbnb over time has lost its host centric edge as it moves into a profit centric mode. Trying to argue that Airbnb is nothing else than another OTA in the landscape should by now be a mute point - acquisition of Hoteltonight, hiking up commission rates "to either pass on to guests or suck it up like you would with OTA's", possible investment in OYO, etc. see more