AirBnb, Is It Harmful For Hotels?

Airbnb is the leading portal for renting apartments and/or private or shared rooms, which was born with the idea of helping users save money during their trips.

We can define it as a kind of social network where we can make our houses available to travelers, for a price that we can decide as we wish. The page is in charge of managing both the collection and the payment (it will charge in advance, but will not pay the owner of the house until we are staying in it and everything has worked as promised).

Among its advantages we highlight the savings we can achieve, the possibility we are given to meet people right away (for example, if we rent a shared house) and the fact that the page works very well, presenting an interface that is very easy to manipulate, with a whole series of intuitive functions so that any user, whether or not they have used this type of pages, knows how to move around them at all times.

Now… to what extent is this harming hotels? Is it really doing irreparable damage to the hotel sector, as so many media outlets are trying to proclaim from the rooftops? Let’s analyze this issue in detail.

AIRBNB VS HOTELS

Studies carried out from the years 2013-2016 ensure that, although it is true that many people trust Airbnb as a lodging method, the truth is that its participation in the markets is very small. The hotel industry has been able to adapt to the new times, offering very competitive prices, but without sacrificing even for a moment its high benefits, precisely being one of the main reasons why the client ends up choosing them.

One in two rooms rented on Airbnb are designed for long-term stays, 7 nights or more; That is to say, we could establish that the website’s direct competition is hotels designed for extended stays… something that, according to experts, is not very common.

The data report that the growth of both sectors has increased in parallel; That is to say, none of them has taken work from the other. Likewise, experts are cautious before launching any type of conclusion: Airbnb has been in the market since 2008, and in 2009 the economic crisis began to spread worldwide.

The user, with the aim of minimizing costs, discovered a new way to save on Airbnb. Now, many years later, it seems that the economic crisis is not as extreme as before, so the business has stabilized, and we can find that the number of hotel clients has increased, and that of Airbnb has decreased, reaching a intermediate point between the two options.

Perhaps, in the near future, we can discover which sector ends up consolidating in the market, but it is still too early to draw any conclusions.