It's kind of frightening to think of the broader economic impact it would have on the whole real estate market if Airbnb went belly up. Aren't there a ton of cases where people are mortgaging multiple homes and paying them off with the revenue they generate? That cash just dried up over night and there doesn't appear to be any incoming federal support.<p>Edit: Look, I'm all for affordable housing, but when viewing this within the context of a looming recession and potential financial crisis I can assure you that the last thing you want to do is add in a potential amplifier to a housing market crash. Houses may get cheaper, but everyone is going to suffer in very difficult to imagine ways. Corporate debt markets are looking scary as hell right now. If you threw a housing market meltdown at it right now, we could easily be looking at something much much worse than what we saw in '08.
This is fair. A lot of hotel groups have seen their revenue drop 75 to 90 percent. Airbnb was never profitable (I think) and this round of trip cancellations put them deeply in the red.
Why should Airbnb be making losses at this point?<p>Are they refunding booking fees to customers while paying hosts?<p>Traditional hotels lose money because of huge amount of, costs (both fixed and variable) associated with running a hotel.<p>shouldn't Airbnb be making so much money at this point?<p>Edit: "...at this point?" not in reference to the current pandemic, rather at this point of how far Airbnb has come and how they've become a household name all over the world.
If you didn't know this already. "Poor" AirBnb here is simply letting customers cancel their stays without even letting hosts know and is then not paying hosts [1].<p>Note that a lot of these "hosts" are often small guesthouses that barely make rent and now have basically nothing for the next months. Of course you have your fair share of "rent hackers" on AirBnb but beyond that a lot of people run genuine small businesses around the platform and care a lot about their guests.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/03/15/airbnb-coronavirus-cancellations-guests-cancel-for-free-hosts-pay-the-costs/#742ec36f131b" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/03/15/airbnb-...</a>
Weren't they already losing money prior to this? Seems like a lot of companies are attributing losses to the Coronavirus masking the actual problem behind it all.
We recently bought a small condo in Portland for our weekend use and as we were shopping around it seemed like the whole Airbnb-triggered rental market was already hopelessly overheated. With the capacity that's there I can't imagine occupancy rates averaged over the year being worth it for the condo owners. I'm guessing there will be a glut of condos available after the virus, many of them in foreclosure.
I'm not very surprised, most of the travel industry is getting hit hard. On a side note, I had a very bad experience with Airbnb. I found out, because it happened to me, that they remove negative reviews of hosts. I lot of the rating on their site are goosed.
It will be interesting to see what happens to all these VC-backed companies that have been losing money for years and are still not profitable.<p>When the VC money runs out not even government bailouts will help. Helping money-losing companies to lose more money isn't in the interest of a government unless they are essential to the rest of the economy or national security.<p>Maybe the bay area will be hit much harder than other companies.