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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

It's going to be interesting to watch Airbnb IPO at just below the valuation of Priceline.com / Booking Holdings, while Priceline has 3x the revenue and 50-100x the profit. That's a helluva bet on Airbnb still having immense growth left in the tank, as the IPO valuation is already pulling at least five or six years of growth forward.

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I also have a sneaking suspicion that whilst AirBnB have undeniably executed well, Booking.com is at least as well placed to go after AirBnB's market as the reverse (AirBnB-type rooms, apartments and villas at competitive prices do exist on Booking.com albeit in much smaller numbers, they also have a strong brand and hosts aren't tied to a single platform).

The other interesting comparison point is Sabre: completely the opposite end of the distribution scale and not a rapid growth company, but they're significantly more profitable than AirBnB at a tiny fraction of the valuation (and have an excellent moat)

To me it feels like Priceline have already started moving in that direction.

There's a Booking.com ad in Australia that is very AirBnB-esque (to the point that my partner thought it was an AirBnB ad until the Booking.com tagline came up); so my feeling is that they're ready and keen to compete in that space.

The difference to me as a consumer is that Booking has commoditized its customer support to an infuriatingly low quality. Admittedly I don't use Air BnB often but I will go miles out of the way (literally and figuratively) to avoid dealing with their systems requiring "travel insurance" for what used to be simple customer service requests.

What kind of customer service requests are you thinking of? As I've used booking services quite extensively, but never actually had any need to contact customer service.

Agreed. However many tech companies are over valued right now.

Booking is at 78.68B. From first hand experience I think Airbnb's technology is at least 10x better than Booking's (I visited and talked to both Airbnb and Booking.com employees in their respective offices).

> I think Airbnb's technology is at least 10x better than Booking's

Perhaps a cynical or unpopular point of view but until the technology becomes a hindrance, does that really matter? Its not as though people are going to these sites because they have great technology. They go to them because the prices are good and they have good UX I assume?

I'm assuming "technology" means the UX in this case, and it is absolutely a big part of the reason I keep coming back to AirBNB while I plan an upcoming vacation with multiple stays. I can find places with the constraints I'm looking for quickly, and conveniently see them laid out on a map. The UX on other sites I've tried make it more difficult to find places where I want to stay.

AirBnb's excellent UX wins me over. What pushes me away, is the hidden fees (service, cleaning, extra $ for 2+ guests, etc).

Interesting, as I find AirBnb's mobile UX somewhat worse than Booking/Hotels. Especially the map view is next to non-functional, always scrolling to wrong places and unintuitive swiping between properties. Could be issue only on Android though, as I haven't tried the iOS app.

Agreed, you can't trust the price listed on the search page, need to visit each listing to get the actual price for the stay.

It is very cell phone and cable billing, there is only a very loose relationship between the advertised price and what you will actually pay.

I think HomeAway was a little bit better about this, amortizing the fees over the length of the stay and including in the listed per night price.

I don't think that's cynical at all, just pragmatic.

I used to run infrastructure for Booking until a couple of years ago. I'll honestly admit that there's lots of tech debt. AMA - but I'll say that I'll provide no response time SLO due to work travel.

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