The leader of the sharing economy: Airbnb starts from house rentals and develops one-stop services for tourism, food and accommodation

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When talking about Airbnb, what do you think of? Do your impressions of this company still focus on B&B rental services? In fact, that’s right. Airbnb Company (Airbnb, Inc.) was founded in August 2008 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA. Their entrepreneurial philosophy is very simple. They hope that consumers from all over the world who are in need of travel and accommodation can quickly find B&B room types that meet their needs and budget through this platform.

In recent years, the “Sharing Economy” trend has been in the ascendant. Airbnb has been hailed by many experts and scholars as a representative company of the sharing economy, as famous as Uber, another well-known company. But unlike Uber, which is still in the stage of losing a lot of money and relying on capital investment (losses reached 3 billion US dollars in one year alone), Airbnb has already started to turn losses into profits in the second half of last year (2016)!

According to Bloomberg’s report, Airbnb completed its tenth financing since its founding in September 2016. Not only did it receive funding from Alphabet (Google Capital)’s US$555 million investment also increased the company’s worth, with its valuation rising to US$30 billion.

Airbnb’s value has skyrocketed, with its valuation reaching $30 billion.

Airbnb’s business model is actually very simple and clear. They are based on more than 2 million rental houses distributed in 34,000 cities around the world, and then charge 6% to 12% of the rent as a handling fee. Because the outside world is generally optimistic about Airbnb’s prospects, the media estimates that their revenue will reach 10 billion US dollars in three years.

Airbnb is optimistic about the prospects of the real estate and tourism markets. It not only invests a lot of resources, but also aims to improve the consumer experience. At the Airbnb Open 2016 Conference held in November 2016, the company’s founder and CEO Brian Chesky (Brian Chesky once announced their new direction: in the future, Airbnb will no longer be a simple home space sharing website, but a one-stop service provider that provides short-distance travel accommodation, hotel and airline reservations, and even car rentals.

Airbnb is optimistic about the real estate and tourism markets and plans to provide one-stop services for food, clothing, housing and transportation.

From this conversation, it is not difficult to see that Airbnb has not only successfully entered the United States (even the Taiwan market is within its business scope), but has also extended its business tentacles from short-term rental houses to the tourism industry. It can be said that Airbnb takes real estate as its core and then integrates upstream and downstream. This move also makes the business operation blueprint clearer and helps to continue to increase revenue based on the “sharing economy”.

At this conference, Brian Queski also took advantage of the opportunity to announce that the Airbnb website has successfully completed its redesign, and added new products such as Experiences and Places to provide activities reservations, travel recommendations and other services to consumers from all over the world. In addition, Airbnb has recently launched reservation services at 650 restaurants in 16 metropolitan areas across the United States, including New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and Miami, actively entering the catering service market.

Recently, Airbnb has made another new initiative. They have joined hands with Newgard, a high-end real estate company in the United States, to build branded hotel apartments next to the theme-park-heavy Orlando theme park in Florida. Their division of labor is clear. Newgard provides property services such as room design and daily cleaning, while hundreds of rooms will be rented out through the Airbnb platform. This cooperation model, which combines the strengths of both parties, is also expected to usher in a new era for the U.S. real estate industry.

Airbnb has recently joined hands with high-end real estate developers to build branded serviced apartments.

Jaja Jackson, director of Airbnb’s global multi-family housing partnership department, revealed that in addition to this cooperation case, there are five other apartment buildings with similar concepts that are under active preparation. If this cooperation with Newgard goes smoothly, Airbnb will promote this new type of service to many countries around the world in the future.

★ Featured image credit: Patrick Perkins

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Further reading

• Make good use of AI tools to help you understand what foreign language videos are saying in seconds
• Krenz talks about personal business model design: use the Hakka spirit to create a successful flywheel
• Stop developing apps, it seems you can make money faster by selling T-shirts online

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