I used to be a pretty big fan of AirBnb, however more recently I find myself booking through other sites such as Homeaway. Check out the latest news however as reported by NY Times, Airbnb is set to acquire HotelTonight, which provides last minute hotel bookings.
Airbnb To Acquire HotelTonight
As reported by the NY Times,
SAN FRANCISCO — AirBnb says it plans to acquire HotelTonight, a service for travelers seeking last-minute hotel bookings, in a deal that will expand the lodging-rental company’s portfolio with traditional and boutique hotel listings.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition values HotelTonight in the vicinity of its last private valuation, $465 million, said two people who were briefed on the deal and were not authorized to disclose the price. That would make it Airbnb’s biggest acquisition.
In a statement, Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s chief executive, emphasized the company’s desire to expand into all aspects of travel. “A big part of building an end-to-end travel platform is serving every guest, whether they plan their trip a year or a day in advance,†he said.
Bottom Line
If you haven’t tried AirBnb yet, you can sign up via my referral for a discount on your first booking.
HT:Â NY Times
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Curious why your using Homeaway more than Airbnb. I ask because as a host of multiple units, we’ve mostly moved away from Homeaway – even though we do get some of our bookings from there (less than 2%) – most of our bookings come from Airbnb (98%). We actually raised our pricing on HA in order to discourage bookings because it’s more cumbersome and if we get bookings there, at least the extra effort is worth it. Why? Several reasons, (1) lack of profiles/reviews on guests [this is problematic because as hosts, we dont just let anyone stay at our places – and have had issues in the past with bad guests looking to do nefarious things – so we do a lot of screening], (2) for every real inquiry we get on HA, we get 3-4 scammers asking to pay by personal check … [it seems the lack of profiles and reviews allows this to happen], (3) HA doesn’t have an API integration with our smartlocks [lockstate] so we have to create our guest lockcodes manually, (4) the fee to the host is much higher than Airbnb. Same with booking.com – got rid of them – just too many scammers with bad or stolen credit cards [since booking.com doesn’t process the payment for us – host have to process ourselves]. So just asking if we’re missing something by not trying harder to work on our HA listings.
Homeaway and VRBO used to be good. But then they got greedy. Homeaway (partly owned by Google Ventures) started buying up all the competitors and then they drastically raised prices. They figured out their model wasn’t good compared to Airbnb and they tried to change their model.
The software/website for Homeaway and VRBO is horrible. Clunky and looks like it’s from the 80’s. It’s horrible! Airbnb is head and shoulders better than VRBO or Homeaway from every aspect. Any property on Homeaway is typically on Airbnb as well.