Comment by taylorhou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taylorhou | Hacker News Reader

coming from anecdotal data (i'm a superhost that co-hosts for others), airbnb's are KILLING it right now as families are visiting families and when families travel, they tend to prefer whole home rentals rather than hotels (in normal times) but in covid times, don't even consider hotels at all so all of the demand goes to airbnb and similar.

i should clarify that my observation is for populated cities that aren't specifically tourist destinations

I would imagine when business travel starts picking back up, they will also prefer whole homes (albeit smaller 1-2 bedrooms) to stay away from the uncontrollable hotel environment which I'd guestimate turns into folks who already had covid or folks who just DGAF.

As a startup founder who already booked airbnb's for team travel instead of hotels, I absolutely won't even consider a hotel until vaccines are readily accessible, if not longer.

the risk to staff are hard to mitigate and I don't even want to think about what happens when traveling employees catch covid on a business trip. gyah.

tldr - still long on airbnb but short term, they are doing better than many would expect because they have like 95% of covid travel stays.

Anecdotally, I run an Airbnb on our second floor - it's a 450sqft apartment in a pretty good spot in Philadelphia. When the lockdown happened, three months of nearly 100% occupancy evaporated in about three days. After a couple of weeks, local bookings trickled in - 20-somethings who wanted to get high outside of their parents house and take any extra toilet paper they could find. One or two even tried to sneak a party in, but were apologetic and understanding when we asked them to wrap it up and send their friends home. And we finally had our first domestic violence incident, which was traumatic but ultimately resulted in better things for our guest. It bears repeating: 2020 has been rough.

When Airbnb put out guidelines - sanitize, don't allow gatherings, 24-hour cooldown between bookings, etc., we bumped up our rate and started communicating that up front before accepting bookings - and everything got much better. For the last few months, our weekends have been booked solid - mostly for weddings and anniversaries. A couple of remote workers who wanted a change of scenery. Was it the 100% occupancy we've had during summer months in year past? No. But it feels like a better balance.

I think the lockdown flushed out the people misusing the system. Were those people and those setups part of Airbnb's valuation? Probably. But it feels like it's brought things closer to the original purpose of Airbnb. I hope they pull through, but even in the event they don't, someone will swoop in to take over that market.

I wonder what your thoughts are on what will happen when the world opens back up.

- Do you think some of those problematic/abusive bookings will start coming back? - Do you think Airbnb might actually start marketing hard again to increase demand on their platform?

I suspect that diehard Airbnb fans (most of my close circle prefer it over hotels) will come back quickly when they are able

While I don't share your fear of hotels, I can add a bit of anecdata from the summer in Europe.

I booked an AirBnB in a major city for 16 days because I thought there was a nonzero chance I'd have to quarantine for 14 of them. Had I tested positive (or not tested) it would have sucked to be in a hotel for the whole stretch, and staying with friends would have defeated the purpose of quarantine.

The price was about 20% below pre-Covid peak prices, so not really much of a discount. A quite nice hotel room would have cost about the same all-in.

I have to think there must be at least some of that factoring in: if you need to go somewhere and you might get quarantined there, you are going to plan ahead, and for lots of reasons quarantine in a 1BR apartment is way nicer than in a hotel.

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