Premium Essay

Airbnb, What the Big Deal

In:

Submitted By max66s
Words 1124
Pages 5
AirBnB.com – What’s the big deal?

Air BnB is a growing online service which facilitates the availability and marketing of, generally, residential accommodation as tourist accommodation. Airbnb defines itself as a “social website that connects people who have space to spare with those who are looking for a place to stay".
The site has been the subject of much debate around its creation of a sharing economy for tourist accommodation which may avoid taxes, expose guests to undue risks, and broadly have a negative impact on legitimate tourist accommodation.
The last of these is a real concern as the site lists accommodation under three primary types: 1. “Entire place” – basically a holiday home or unit generally 2. “Private Room” – similar to B & B style accommodation 3. “Shared room” – similar concept / style to a sort of private backpacker accommodation
However, by industry practice Air BnB equates to an OTA or booking engine in style and seemingly focuses and attracts micro accommodation providers covering many traditional styles but also simply free bed space (being the original concept). Indeed the term micro-hotel has cropped up a lot lately in line with the service. Basically it facilitates turning homes into tourist accommodation – a lot like a B & B or Holiday Home – so what’s the big deal?

AirBnB charge guests a 9-12% service fee every time a reservation is booked, depending on the length of the reservation, and they charge hosts a 3% service fee to cover the cost of processing payments. From a marketing perspective then it’s basically a distribution channel – so what’s the big deal?

Airbnb's business model currently operates with minimal regulatory controls. They have implemented an insurance program (for “hosts”) and more recently some safety requirements for US properties. There is also a two way feedback mechanism and

Similar Documents

Premium Essay

Btec Unit 12 Internet Marketing

...challenges of globalization facing a selected business when using the internet as a marketing tool (P6) AIRBNB The success of the company for the last three years AIRBNB started in August 2008 and is located in San Fancisco. AIRBNB is a company that offers worldwide unique accommodations. These accommodations are from people, for example they going on vacation, but they don’t want that their house empty is that time. So they rent it to people who want to rent their house and the will pay for it. AIRBNB, make this thing possible. The last three years went very well for AIRBNB, because they exist about almost 8 years now. If you look further at the picture down the text. You see that these articles all from 2013, since that time they came more known for people. Before 2013 they didn’t much to support on this kind of way their company. AIRBNB says also that their company is still growing of the users, who want to rent their house or want stay in a house for a while. Now a days they have, With a own calculation, I think that 3 years ago that the figures were, 60.000.000+ total of guests. 37.500.000+ total of guests. 34.000+ total of cities. 21.250+ total of cities. 1.400+ total of castles. 875+ total of castles. 190+ total of countries. 119+ total of countries. 2.000.000+ of accommodations worldwide. 1.250.000 of accommodations worldwide What did the company turnover, service, growth in customers and other factors to achieve this What’s good...

Words: 1460 - Pages: 6

Premium Essay

Airbnbv

...Airbnb, Inc. Marketing Plan Table of Contents Executive Summary 3 Situational Analysis 3 Company Analysis 3 Company and Marketing Objectives 4 Screening Criteria 5 Company Resources 5 Present Marketing Strategy 6 Marketing Collaborators - Current & Potential 7 Political and Legal 7 Competitive Analysis 9 Customer Analysis 11 Demographic Data 12 Market Analysis 12 Who is the target market? 12 Problem and Opportunity Summary 13 S.W.O.T and Key Factors from Situational Analysis 14 Strengths of Airbnb 14 Weaknesses of Airbnb 14 Opportunities of Airbnb 15 Threats of Airbnb 15 Target Market 15 Positioning Strategy 20 Other Core Strategies 22 Product 23 Product Life Cycle 27 Channels 27 Sales building blocks – techniques 28 Price 29 Promotion 33 Hospitality Forecast and Airbnb future 36 Conclusions: 37 Bibliography 38 Executive Summary Airbnb, Inc was built because of a risky idea and the company has continued to take risks as they have grown since 2008. That tendency of taking a risk has grown the company from eating dry cereal to survive, to being worth around $10 billion. Airbnb will continue to take that risk and succeed with their outlook toward customer service and providing the “sharing community” that Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk dreamed up. Opportunities for expanding brand awareness are what the company will focus on now with more advertising by mainstream media and word of mouth...

Words: 8892 - Pages: 36

Free Essay

Days and Nights

...1. Determination This has turned out to be the most important quality in startup founders. We thought when we started Y Combinator that the most important quality would be intelligence. That's the myth in the Valley. And certainly you don't want founders to be stupid. But as long as you're over a certain threshold of intelligence, what matters most is determination. You're going to hit a lot of obstacles. You can't be the sort of person who gets demoralized easily. Bill Clerico and Rich Aberman of WePay are a good example. They're doing a finance startup, which means endless negotiations with big, bureaucratic companies. When you're starting a startup that depends on deals with big companies to exist, it often feels like they're trying to ignore you out of existence. But when Bill Clerico starts calling you, you may as well do what he asks, because he is not going away. 2. Flexibility You do not however want the sort of determination implied by phrases like "don't give up on your dreams." The world of startups is so unpredictable that you need to be able to modify your dreams on the fly. The best metaphor I've found for the combination of determination and flexibility you need is a running back. He's determined to get downfield, but at any given moment he may need to go sideways or even backwards to get there. The current record holder for flexibility may be Daniel Gross of Greplin. He applied to YC with some bad ecommerce idea. We told him we'd fund him if he did...

Words: 780 - Pages: 4

Free Essay

Our Founders, What We Look for

...1. Determination This has turned out to be the most important quality in startup founders. We thought when we started Y Combinator that the most important quality would be intelligence. That's the myth in the Valley. And certainly you don't want founders to be stupid. But as long as you're over a certain threshold of intelligence, what matters most is determination. You're going to hit a lot of obstacles. You can't be the sort of person who gets demoralized easily. Bill Clerico and Rich Aberman of WePay are a good example. They're doing a finance startup, which means endless negotiations with big, bureaucratic companies. When you're starting a startup that depends on deals with big companies to exist, it often feels like they're trying to ignore you out of existence. But when Bill Clerico starts calling you, you may as well do what he asks, because he is not going away. 2. Flexibility You do not however want the sort of determination implied by phrases like "don't give up on your dreams." The world of startups is so unpredictable that you need to be able to modify your dreams on the fly. The best metaphor I've found for the combination of determination and flexibility you need is a running back. He's determined to get downfield, but at any given moment he may need to go sideways or even backwards to get there. The current record holder for flexibility may be Daniel Gross of Greplin. He applied to YC with some bad ecommerce idea. We told him we'd fund him if he did...

Words: 744 - Pages: 3

Premium Essay

Sharing Economy

...Sharing corps: Should company build competitive advantage by embracing the sharing economy? SHARING CORPS SHOULD COMPANIES build a new competitive advantage BY embracing the SHARING ECONOMY? ECOVALA - December 2013 1 Sharing corps: Should company build competitive advantage by embracing the sharing economy? Ecovala © 2013 This report was produced by the Ecovala in December 2013. If no other source is specified, the contents of this report are under a Creative Commons Attribution – Non-Commercial - Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. You can find the full text of the license in this website. Ecovala Ecovala provides innovative solutions to private and public organisations to accelerate their transition towards sustainability. The organisation offers a wide range of services around sustainability and system innovation: from companies’ environmental assessment to sustainable strategic design, from new green services definition to effective implementation of CSR management. Based in Finland, the organisation is active throughout Europe, relying on an extensive network of like-minded organisations and sustainability experts. www.ecovala.eu Author Erwan Mouazan is director and founder of Ecovala. He develops and implements innovative sustainability solutions both at private and public level. Erwan owns a Master's degree in economics, with a specialization in international management. In the last 9 years, he has worked at international level in environmental...

Words: 10348 - Pages: 42

Premium Essay

Accounting

...By Samantha Murphy Kelly2 days ago An encryption flaw called the Heartbleed bug that has exposed a collection of popular websites — from Airbnb and Yahoo to NASA and OKCupid — could be one of the biggest security threats the Internet has ever seen. If you have logged into any of the affected sites over the past two years, your account information could be compromised, allowing cybercriminals to snap up your credit card information or steal your passwords. You're likely affected either directly or indirectly by the bug, which was found by a member of Google's security team and a software firm named Codenomicon. The bad news: There's not a lot you can do about it now. It's the responsibility of Internet companies to update their servers to deal with Heartbleed, and once they do, you can take action (see below). See also: The Heartbleed Hit List: The Passwords You Need to Change Right Now The issue involves network software called OpenSSL, which is an open-source set of libraries for encrypting online services. Secure websites — with “https” in the URL ("s" stands for secure) — make up 56% of websites, and nearly half of those sites were vulnerable to the bug. Secure websites — with “https” in the URL ("s" stands for secure) — make up 56% of websites, and nearly half of those sites were vulnerable to the bug. In theory, a cybercriminal could have exploited Heartbleed by making network requests that could piece together your sensitive data. The good news: There isn't any indication...

Words: 754 - Pages: 4

Premium Essay

Lede

...'Twerk' is now in the dictionary, thanks to Miley Cyrus By Elisabeth Donnelly August 28, 2013, 7:56 a.m. Thanks to Miley Cyrus, the word "twerk" has been everywhere this week. And now it's going in the dictionary. Cyrus' gyrations during her performance at Sunday's MTV Video Music Awards caused a stir and put the word "twerk" on everyone's lips — and in the Oxford Dictionaries Online. Dictionary officials call them "buzzworthy words added to Oxford Dictionaries Online" — "twerk" joins "bitcoin," "selfie," and "girl crush." They'll all now found in the Oxford Dictionaries Online, which is tasked with staying up to date with modern words. The Oxford Dictionaries Online is one of the largest in the world and adds about 1,000 new entries to its online version every year. Oxford Dictionaries' spokeswoman Katherine Connor Martin told the Associated Press that "twerking" dates back 20 years, and "the most likely theory is that it is an alteration of work ... with dancers being encouraged to 'work it.' The 't' could be a result of blending with another word such as twist or twitch." Its sibling publication, the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary, won't be updated with these words anytime soon, unless "twerk, verb" proves to have staying power. Or as the Oxford Dictionaries Online's usage example puts it: "twerk it girl, work it girl." Taking her daughters to remote Australia to sleep on the ground Australia's Northern Territory is just the place to get...

Words: 2549 - Pages: 11

Premium Essay

Media Ventures

...Media Ventures 15.376 Real Estate & Recruitment – A strategic Analysis Introduction: During this semester our team examined two key issues that have a significant impact on the lives of many working professionals: real estate and recruitment. Though these two issues appear to be disjointed, they have a similarly significant financial impact of the quality of life of most individuals in the world. Real Estate: I. Background: The real estate industry is in a unique state of flux brought on by the proliferation of the sharing economy. The advent of AirBnB, UBER, Lyft, Zip CAR have effectively demonstrated that communal ownership of an asset is often much more efficient than singular ownership, provided an efficient channel for distribution and use of the asset exists. Though AirBnB has made great strides towards bringing home ownership into the fold of the sharing economy, an analysis of the notion and future of home ownership indicate that substantial room for innovation exists in addressing the pain points associated with the use of property. II. Pain Points: Despite the innovation of recent years, homeowners continue to be plagued by several persistent pain points related to liquidity, taxation, equity and maintenance of property. Liquidity: Real estate still remains largely an illiquid asset due to the high costs associated with the sale of property. No reliable peer-to-peer network exists for the sale of property, thereby leaving homeowners...

Words: 5275 - Pages: 22

Premium Essay

Theories of Marketing

...Marketing Week 1 – lecture 1 History of marketing 1. Production : supplying markets 2. Selling: convince people that what the organization happen to have is what they need. 3. marketing : let’s ask people what they want and then produce it. What can I make that will serve my customers better? It needs to be something relevant, innovative or unique MKG definition it’s all about sales and market share : it doesn’t say anything about relationship NOW : how can I create value so I will be able to sale more, it’s the only way to survive. To stay alive you need to have a lot of capabilities and tools to survive What is marketing? Marketing includes more than just needs, it’s concerned with providing the right product to the right person at the right moment. That way it creates value. This way it also incorporates innovation. Functions & processes/activities are the things we do to deliver customer value. These can be strategic and tactical. History of marketing thought - philosophy *  Production orientation, huge production lines trying to find bigger markets. Its all about efficient distribution. Demand is huge, supply was very small, they didn’t care about colour for example. Marketing was all about getting your product efficiently to the consumer. Marketing is a very contextual science, how do we deal with circumstances, and how do we become successful in these circumstances. *  Selling orientation, extra activities, not only distribute...

Words: 11416 - Pages: 46

Premium Essay

How to Raise Money Essay

...How to Raise Money Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. September 2013 Most startups that raise money do it more than once. A typical trajectory might be (1) to get started with a few tens of thousands from something like Y Combinator or individual angels, then (2) raise a few hundred thousand to a few million to build the company, and then (3) once the company is clearly succeeding, raise one or more later rounds to accelerate growth. Reality can be messier. Some companies raise money twice in phase 2. Others skip phase 1 and go straight to phase 2. And at Y Combinator we get an increasing number of companies that have already raised amounts in the hundreds of thousands. But the three phase path is at least the one about which individual startups' paths oscillate. This essay focuses on phase 2 fundraising. That's the type the startups we fund are doing on Demo Day, and this essay is the advice we give them. Forces Fundraising is hard in both senses: hard like lifting a heavy weight, and hard like solving a puzzle. It's hard like lifting a weight because it's intrinsically hard to convince people to part with large sums of money. That problem is irreducible; it should be hard. But much of the other kind of difficulty can be eliminated. Fundraising only seems a puzzle because it's an alien world to most founders, and I hope to fix that by supplying a map through it. To founders, the behavior of investors is often opaque—partly because...

Words: 10709 - Pages: 43

Free Essay

Uber

...2015 MGMT 5260 – Final Project Project Report Ha Luu Nguyen 213651096 Nidhi Joshi 213678271 Nomita Chennamraju 213862529 Raghvendra Bagla 213678560 Srini Venkatachalam 213678453 MGMT 5260 – Final Project Contents EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ................................................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. APPENDIX – 1 – BUSINESS MODEL OF UBER ................................................................................................................ 6 Purpose and scope.................................................................................................................................................... 6 Methodology and sources of information ................................................................................................................ 6 Highlights of findings and implications for value creation. ...................................................................................... 6 APPENDIX – 2 – VALUE CREATION CYCLE OF UBER ...................................................................................................... 7 Purpose and scope.................................................................................................................................................... 7 Methodology and sources of information ................................................................................................................ 7 ...

Words: 6582 - Pages: 27

Premium Essay

The New Corporate Garage

...The Big Idea hbr.org Scott D. Anthony is the managing director of Innosight Asia-Pacific and the author of The Little Black Book of Innovation (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). The New Corporate Garage Illustration: otto steininger Where today’s most innovative—and world-changing—thinking is taking place by Scott D. Anthony Quick: List the big companies that have launched paradigm-shifting innovations in recent decades. There’s Apple—and, well, Apple. The popular perception is that most corporations are just too big and deliberate to produce game-changing inventions. We look to hungry entrepreneurs—the Gateses, Zuckerbergs, Pages, and Brins—instead. The rise of fast, nimble, and passionate venture-capital-backed entrepreneurs seems to have made slow-paced big-company innovation obsolete, or at least to have consigned it to the world of incremental advances. But Apple’s inventiveness is no anomaly; it indicates a dramatic shift in the world of innovation. The revolution spurred by venture capitalists decades ago has created the conditions in which scale enables big companies to stop shackling innovation and start unleashing it. September 2012 Harvard Business Review 45 The Big Idea The New Corporate Garage Three trends are behind this shift. First, the increasing ease and decreasing cost of innovation mean that start-ups now face the same short-term pressures that have constrained innovation at large companies; as soon as a young company gets a whiff of success...

Words: 5429 - Pages: 22

Premium Essay

E-Commerce Boom in India

...and to $14 billion in 2012.[1] About 75% of this is travel related (airline tickets, railway tickets, hotel bookings, online mobile recharge etc.). Online Retailing comprises about 12.5% ($300 Million[7] as of 2009). India has close to 10 million online shoppers and is growing at an estimated 30%[8] CAGR vis-à-vis a global growth rate of 8–10%. Electronics and Apparel are the biggest categories in terms of sales. Key drivers in Indian e-commerce are: * Increasing broadband Internet (growing at 20%[9] MoM) and 3G penetration.[10] * Rising standards of living and a burgeoning, upwardly mobile middle class with high disposable incomes * Availability of much wider product range (including long tail and Direct Imports) compared to what is available at brick and mortar retailers * Busy lifestyles, urban...

Words: 5355 - Pages: 22

Free Essay

Medicatour

...| Medica tour Ltd | Business plan | | Zrinka Vrdoljak | 6/20/2012 | Table of Content: 1. Executive summary 2 2.1. Objectives 2 2.2. Mission 2 2. Company summary 3 3.3. Company ownership 3 3.4. Industrial overview 3 3.5. Start-up summary 4 3.6.1. Start-up funding 4 3.6.2. Start-up requirement 4 3. Marketing analyse summary 5 4.6. Marketing segmentation 5 4.7. Competition 6 4.8.3. Competitors strengths 6 4.8.4. Competitors weakness 7 4.8. Closely related competitor 7 4. Strategy 8 5.9. SWOT analyse 8 5.10. Marketing mix 8 5.11. Sales strategy 9 5.12.5. Sales forecast 9 5.12. Milestones 10 5.13. Technology 10 5. Financial plan 12 6.14. Pro forma cash flow 12 6.15. Pro forma profit & loss 13 Appendix 15 Reference 18 1. Executive summary The company Medica tours Ltd. was established for the performance of the organization of tourist visits for medical purposes. The main activity is providing services for travel, accommodation and activities related to health care. Services include: contact with selected health care organizations, organizing transport, accommodation and additional tourist activities. Their services exclusively performed in accordance with business partners such as dental clinics...

Words: 9489 - Pages: 38

Premium Essay

European Hospitality Sector

...Room to grow European cities hotel forecast for 2014 and 2015. 18 gateway cities, Amsterdam to Zurich March 2014 www.pwc.com/hospitality II Room to grow Contents Summary 2 How did 2013 turn out? 4 Spotlight on prospects for 2014 and 2015 6 Beyond the data: trends transforming hotel businesses 14 Economic, travel and supply outlook 20 From Amsterdam to Zurich: Which cities are best placed to grow? 25 Appendices: Full data tables 49 Further reading 52 Contacts 53 Summary This third edition of our European cities hotel forecast is published against a backdrop of a region that has taken an economic pounding but is seeing clear evidence of economic recovery and returning confidence The world is changing at a pace and in this snapshot (taken in February 2014) we look forward to a resurgence in travel and hotel prospects in 2014 and 2015. 2 Room to grow (c)Suzanne Christ In terms of where hotels are compared to before the recession, in nominal terms the market is almost back at its pre-recession peak (reached during 2007) but it remains significantly behind in real terms. For example, European ADR is now only 5.7% below its pre-recession levels in nominal terms but 17.9% lower in real terms. There are 18 cities in this econometric forecast – all are important gateway cities and/or business and tourism centres and some are en route to becoming mega cities. The 18 reflect ...

Words: 18551 - Pages: 75