Skift Take
Booking.com has been working on building up its U.S. supply of short-term rentals for several years, relying on relationships with property managers. Perhaps it needs to take on the more labor-intensive task of focusing on individual hosts. It won’t be easy.
Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel said he’s disappointed that the company’s U.S. short-term rental portfolio doesn’t “have near the number or the type of home accommodations in the U.S. to be fully competitive.”
An analyst during Booking’s second-quarter earnings call Thursday asked Fogel whether Booking.com has achieved enough parity â presumably with Airbnb â in the U.S. to lean into marketing to wrangle market share gains.
Fogel replied that Booking.com isn’t “at that level at all right now” in terms of U.S. supply despite 7.8 million short-term rental listings around the world.
“We won’t be spending huge amounts of money on a subpar product,” Fogel added.
Booking.com in The Hamptons
Fogel said if you search Booking.com for a rental in The Hamptons, a luxurious Long Island, New York collection of villages and hamlets, there’s probably not many short-term rentals there “compared to some other people,” meaning Airbnb and perhaps Vrbo.
“I don’t want that to be,” Fogel said. “I want us to have as many, if not more, and I want it to be easier for them to come. I want to trust that coming to Booking is a better way to get that summer rental. And we’re going to work on that, and that’s good for us, an opportunity for us. But your answer is correct. We’re not there yet.”
In the second quarter and at a global level, Booking.com reported progress in its “alternative accommodations” business, which grew faster than the rest of the company. Booking.com’s room nights in the sector jumped 12% year over year, and short-term rentals were 36% of its accommodations bookings, up 2 percentage points.
Booking.com officials argue that they offer a unique value proposition to travelers because their accommodations’ results are a mix of hotels and short-term rentals, unlike Airbnb and Vrbo, which mostly offer apartments and vacation rentals. Airbnb has a smattering of hotels, as well.
Booking.com Versus Airbnb
Analytics Firm AirDNA did a report on Booking.com versus Airbnb on a global basis. Here’s a graphic from the report.
