I think it may be easy to compare the two now, but back in the days they were fairly different. I was a fairly early user of Airbnb (they opened at a time when I was young and traveled a lot, especially solo). During those days, Airbnb was truly about renting out extra space in your own home. (Maybe not an "airbed" every time, but just a room in your house/apartment, nonetheless) All of my early usages of Airbnb (as a guest -- I was never a host) were actually renting rooms in these strangers' apartments, that they live in themselves. This was in France, Italy, Brazil, etc. It's not about vacation houses in popular resort places (Lake Tahoe etc.). In fact, I remember back in the days there was a lot of comparison of Airbnb and Couchsurfing. One is paid and one is free, sure, but both were very much about meeting folks locally.
Sibling comment conductr is part of the problem, the same blindness as Airbnb: I want what other people have (private pads in cool locations, rented by the day), and I don’t care if that’s unsustainable in the long term, I will just take advantage of it now.
Correct. I first used VRBO sometime around 2002. They were the only game in town for this kind of thing for a long time. Yes, you could rent out space in peoples' homes, but if you wanted a vacation spot that wasn't a motel, they (eventually) did that better than VRBO did. I'm pretty sure VRBO didn't change their vintage 1996 website until well after AirBNB was a competitor. Multiple years. I could be wrong on that, but suffice it to say that AirBNB also filled a vacation house need that VRBO had been limping on.