Sorry to hear about the layoffs, but customer experience has been great for me.
Their loyalty program (Genius) is automatic and simple too where's competitors resort to various coupon and other complex "discounts".
I surely hope Booking is not going away.
They... Do not have great things to say about their experience working with a lot of the aggregators.
At the end of the day, what you have is multiple networks that somewhat overlap and provide API for finding and booking and Web interfaces for the high street retailers etc.
Making an aggregator means, you getting an access to these API and therefore there are many aggregators out there. The problem is, the margins are really tight at that point and you can hardly do anything about it. The money used to be in the high street retail where you can have fat margins and sell extra services like city tours, paragliding - that also have fat margins.
The industry have seen quite a bit of squeeze both because of AirBnB and the aggregators.
A good way to make a lot of money is to contract all the hotels in an area and sell the company to a bedbank like Hotelbeds. Now hotels are opening every day, things change every day so there's quite bit of people on the ground chasing hotels making deals and getting paid handsomely for it.
A few years back, I remember a startup building a portfolio of Mediterranean(If I recall correctly?) hotels and end up selling the company to a bedbank for 30 Million USD.
If you are not looking into making this into a full blown business, I guess you can take a cut as an agent by hooking up the hotels with the representatives of the bedbanks. Look up for people titled "Market manager" and see if you can arrange a deal with them. Market managers are people responsible of adding new hotels to the portfolio of a company and manage the relationship with these hotels, they usually make good money from commissions. It also often involves things like resolving errors with the booking software, teaching the staff how to use the interface etc.
I guess you can message people from linkedIn and see how they feel about it and maybe they can give you more ideas. Maybe you can consider to get in the industry and become a market manager?
What AirBnB gets horribly wrong is hiding exact location of property. In some cases, 200-300m make all the difference, e.g. directly on the sea coast or 10min up the hill, which can happen when the road goes around. Or is it directly next to a noisy club or in a quiet street behind. Or for skiing, whether you’re directly on the track or not. Probably all my searches on Booking start with basic parameters and then immediatelly switching to map.
Also, even for locations I go often and know very well, and can easily find contacts of accomodations I’m interested in, I still choose Booking because it beats calling tens of different phones when single search shows what’s available for specific dates.
Without hiding the exact location of the property, they'll have other problems, like having the illegal part of their rental stock get discovered and shut down.
So sometimes worth it to see if the Airbnb listing is on other sites as well.
I'm not a happy user, but also not a sad or angry one. I do consider their service trustworthy, though their salesmen ship is a bit slimy
Last time I used them I think they pivoted into fighting with AirBNB so they took on smaller and smaller "venues" up to people (illegally) renting an apartment. The guy straight up threatened me in writing on Booking when I decided to cancel seeing how different the conditions were compared to the pictures.
Why it should be a problem to move some employees to different company? This is happening often...
On a more serious note, yes, the layoffs are bad and I am sorry to hear about it, but when I see people in comments posting about their negative experience with the service, I feel like it's relevant to balance it with my overwhelmingly positive experience with the service.