Excerpt from Reuters
Airbnb’s hotel rentals grew 520% last year - this Finnish startup wants to help them grow even faster
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Airbnb lists over 4 million properties worldwide, including more than 24,000 boutique hotels. It plans to grow the number of hotel listings considerably in 2018.
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Hostaway is a Finnish startup that makes it quick and easy to manage professional rentals, including hotels.
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The startup has raised over €1.1M to date, with plans to grow internationally. Currently the company has offices in Helsinki, Barcelona and Toronto.
What started out as a couple of friends, a spare mattress, and the catchy name “airbedandbreakfast.com” has turned into a $30 billion-dollar business used by over 200 million people in over 190 countries. In fact, Airbnb is now so big that it has the power to distort property markets.
Most people would be quite happy with that kind of growth, but in a recent interview with Forbes Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky explained that last year some 330 million people visited the home-sharing website, searched for accommodation during their travel dates, but left without booking anything.
"I like to joke that we’re one of the biggest alternatives in the world," Chesky said. "Very rarely do 300 million people use something, and people say it’s an alternative. But it’s also rare for 300 million people to use it and to have so many people say it’s not for me or it is an alternative."
To try and catch more of these users, and to move away from being just ‘an alternative’, Airbnb is adding more and more boutique hotel listings to their platform.
And allowing users to rent properties like this lets professional property managers compete with more established hotel chains. Much like with Uber and travel, or Spotify and music, Airbnb is disrupting and democratising the accommodation industry.
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