Is This the End of Airbnb?

Clearly they&#x27;re spending a lot of money, and maybe they&#x27;ll need to do layoffs and&#x2F;or other budget cuts to make it through this, but I imagine Airbnb will actually come out of this even stronger relative to the rest of the hotel industry.<p>They don&#x27;t own or lease buildings the way other hotel chains do, or have their own maintenance or cleaning staff, so they&#x27;ve got to be losing less money per unit right now while everything is shut down. If some hosts over-extended themselves on mortgages for their rental properties and get foreclosed on, that&#x27;s not really Airbnb&#x27;s problem. They may even get bailed out by the government, which then directly benefits Airbnb.<p>And in the medium term, I think their booking rates might bounce back quicker than other hotels. In a world where the lockdowns have lifted but we&#x27;re still recommending&#x2F;enforcing social distancing in most places, which could last years, I imagine the demand to go and stay in a traditional, crowded hotel in Paris or NYC is still going to be pretty low. Business travel may not pick back up very quickly, as companies cut costs in the recession plus they&#x27;ve seen how meetings can mostly be done fine remotely. Massive conferences with thousands of people seem unlikely to happen for a very long time.<p>But people will still want some kind of leisure and vacation. Renting a house or cottage a couple hours away on a lake or in a small vacation town is a relatively safe thing to do where you can maintain social distancing pretty well, which is the scenario where I&#x27;m most likely to use Airbnb instead of a hotel.<p>On top of that, local governments have bigger problems to worry about than short-term rentals right now, so Airbnb may also get a couple years break from their constant legal battles with various cities.

I still can&#x27;t wrap my head around the fact that they have 14,000 employees. Fourteen thousand. For a company that owns no hotels or motels, no real-estate (other than their offices, of course). The website is decent (but no amazeballs), which is all there is to AirBnB (other than customer service, of course). I don&#x27;t understand why this all can&#x27;t be done by, say, 1000 or so employees.

But why it&#x27;s burning hole in the finances? AirBnB is all marketing. Scale down your cloud instances and don&#x27;t spend on ads? What exactly burning money at the rate of 1B per month? It&#x27;s not clear from the article at all.

The question they should be asking is will this kill Marriott and Hilton&#x27;s recently launched AirBnB competitors?<p>While I&#x27;m sure Marriott and Hilton will get a ton of federal money they&#x27;ve got a ton of real estate mortgages to deal with right now. It would be pretty easy (especially if these efforts don&#x27;t have a lot of traction and are costing a lot of money to keep afloat) to just shut them down.

Airbnb<p>If infection does not confer immunity could we be looking at the end of:<p>Hotels, Shopping Malls, Eat in restaurants, Bars, Amusement Parks, Move Theaters, Clubs, Theaters, Public swimming pools, State and National parks, Beaches, Air travel, Train Travel, Bus Travel, Recirculating HVAC systems, Office buildings, Pro sports, college sports, high school sports, sports in general, gyms, parties, funerals,<p>Just to name a few.

Just remember why they started, a bloke could not afford to pay his rent. There was a popular conference and he offered to let someone stay at his house sleeping on an airbed.<p>It was a hack. If the economy stays bad for a period of time both travellers and host will need an Airbnb or similar. Travellers want cheaper accommodation and host will need the money.

airbnb is not a bad business, as a localized venture. imagine each city had it&#x27;s own version of airbnb run by the local city council. not some vc funded, destroy regulations &amp; rental market at all costs, company. a city owned short term rental market would be both beneficial to cities, tourists n hosts. aye, if there&#x27;s any salesperson out there wanna partna on to build a platform we can sell to cities, I&quot;m open.

I have an Airbnb booking for December 2020. Would it be best to cancel now when there is still a chance of a refund?

Let the invisible hand of the market sort it out. Don&#x27;t bail, let them fail.

One can only hope.

The end? I could only wish.<p>That this social cancer was allowed to fester for so long means it will just raise it&#x27;s ugly head once again when conditions are right.

I hope so. It&#x27;s cancer on our society.

in bali, hotels are now offering 3,000,000 rupiahs for 30 days stay<p>that&#x27;s about 6-7 usd &#x2F; day<p>no breakfast &#x2F; food &#x2F; mineral water cleaning every 2 weeks<p>minimum airbnb price floor is like what? 10 usd &#x2F; day?<p>that&#x27;s 50% more expensive than hotel chains in bali for months to come