Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight(press.airbnb.com) |
Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight(press.airbnb.com) |
A hotel working with Airbnb is like BlockBuster working with Netflix to share customer data. The hotels groups aren't as fucking stupid as Blockbuster was, though.
I am the furthest thing from a luddite, but I personally prefer (as I know many others) hotels to Airbnb. There's a consistency to the hotel product that you can't get with Airbnb that I place a premium on, especially for short or last minute stays.
I'm also not really sure why Airbnb is considered a "tech" co in the same way FB or Netflix is. There's is no real time component to the app, and it isn't dealing with billions of people using the app at the same time like a FB or Google is. In the few times I've used Airbnb over the years I'm honestly surprised by how little "tech" really permeates my experience (i.e. its just a basic web app that facilitates the listing + payment transfer + messaging...once I've made the reservation and paid Airbnb's job is essentially done).
However, if I'm traveling by myself or with my partner, hotels still seem the way to go. Valet parking in a city centre with room service can make a stay much comfortable.
Personally I think the term "tech company" is a little more of a blanket statement these days. Virtually every large organization has some "tech" aspect to them.
Do you mostly stay in hotels for business reasons? Or are you just rolling in money?
For example, their post about their work in search ranking is quite interesting [1].
[1]: https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/machine-learning-power...
Every time I try to use Airbnb I have to 'request' from the host and I swear 4 out of 5 times they cancel the requested rental because they're staying in the place or some other BS. I know when I get a hotel room its instantly reserved and there is no question about its availability.
Although some Airbnbs may beat a hotel in every way, consistency holds true value in certain situations.
I don't feel like this analogy applies, however. You can make the argument that hotels are better than AirBnB. It depends on what you value. If you are business traveler (or heck maybe even not), you probably prefer a hotel because you know you are getting a consistent product and experience each time and there is more avenues for you to have your grievances resolved, and quickly -- i.e. "my room stinks I need a new one now" or if you even mention bed bugs the county health department will be there faster than you can post that AirBnB complaint.
If you are a vacationer trying to stay in some obscure location and need somewhere to stay, you probably value AirBnB more.
- Airbnb are going to "create their own content" and try to kill the hotels eventually (very unlikely), or
- Airbnb take too large a cut (possible).
They probably want to put Airbnb listings as options on the hotels tonight app.
I'm not sure. It may be harder to book future dates with HT after the contracts expire, but in my experience HT is most useful when AirBnB isn't (same day booking.)
I'd imagine hotels probably like the last minute bookings. Also you can book at 1 or 2am when hotwire cuts you off at midnight and many other ways of booking stop working after about 10pm.
I believe a good portion of large hotels are aware that at some point they will need to tap into the Airbnb market and if that marketplace (Airbnb) manages to create an environment where both sides can live or directly compete with each other, everyone (winners mostly) will be happy with the outcome.
The real tricky part is that synergy can be difficult to have and different players (hotel customers, airbnb customer, hotels, airbnb renters) may have different degrees of resistances to Airbnb plan.
I think their main focus will be to create a B2B environment that will make big ticket customers (e.g. IBM) want to use their system to get either a rented place or a hotel room for their consultants and business travelers. Lots of money to be made in this area.
Whereas, with Airbnb, they cover any damages that guests may do or issues that may arise from the hosts as well.
You can see how this works in this video I made here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdrFYb4otTs
The entire app is designed to trick people about what the actual prices are. The founder is a total scumbag and belongs in prison.
What should one do with money and clout?
Build a thing...
What type of thing?
AirBnBs are consumed by primarily individuals/couples
How provid?
Welp - where do they go?
They have the data.
So - how about buy up and build tiny-home communities in highest ABnB places?
Partner with Epic Tiny Home providers such as WindRiverTinyHomes
Why not throw that clout around on city planning depts whi dont know how to zone, divest parcels... Alameda is an example - whom I have spoken with about just this
Why not work with Warren Buffets Manufactured Homes groups (whom I have spoken with) to make an inventory....
Why not do many things...
Fuck AIRBnB - have a 20 year vision.
Build a freaking community based on a bolt-on tiny home over a shared common infrastructure in a very common design-build model. (Ive designed built gas stations, fast food, cell sites, data centers, and millions of square feet) - there are LOTs of people like me.
Go build something.
Also, it's unfair to characterize it as a scam if it's printed clearly in the costs. It's your responsibility to read what you're paying for.
It isn't, which is why I posted the video showing that.
On the screen you can very clearly see:
Room (1 Night): $180
Taxes & Fees: $32
Total: $221
In other words, they're purposely trying to hide the fact that the page is scrollable or that there is more content (the fine print) after the fold, and are trying to lead the buyer to believe that they already have the full pricing information before hitting the Pay button.
If the fine print that included the resort fee was above the Payment button then that would be one thing, but it's purposely designed so that you can't even see that the fine print even exists.
It is? In some countries, perhaps. It shouldn't be, and it needn't be, given just a little bit of consumer-friendly regulation of how prices are advertised.
If the hotel wants to charge their own fee separate from the app then that's not a problem at all. The problem is the Hotel Tonight lying about what the prices are.
I've seen this for as long as I can remember: https://imgur.com/a/GsyPKPJ
It clearly displays the resort fee in the hotel information, and before the payment.
It absolutely matters. Blockbuster in it's later years was not only entrenched, but also a bad experience. People were tired of being price gouged with late fees. Netflix was a better experience, even if you got your DVD a couple days later.
> companies don't want to share data with or help out their competition.
We share data with our competition all the time. It may help them, but it also helps us as well. You must decide if the business value it brings you is greater than the perceived data it brings them. Obviously you don't want to share market secrets, but sharing some logistical data doesn't seem too harmful. You aren't sharing the "secret sauce"
Sometimes competitors make the best friends.
I would just turn up. If it's possible it's going to be very busy, I might phone ahead first.
If you know someone goes to London every November, your targeting return just went up 100x.
1. Those that are in another city, knew they were going to be there, and didn’t book ahead (or just need an extra room?)
2. Those that live in a city and decide to get a hotel room tonight.
I’m actually having a hard time figuring out who’s booking last minute (and why a site specializes in it) other than for parties (large groups or.... by the hour).
Anyway, the UI is different now and in big type it says "Due Now" with the resort fee mentioned under that. I personally didn't find it confusing before, but it's now quite clear.
But hotels don't charge you a parking fee if you don't park there. Whereas they won't let you check into the hotel unless you pay the "resort fee".
Again I have no problem with hotels charging part of the price upon check in, but it's super unethical for Hotel Tonight to:
A) advertise hotels based on prices you can't actually get a room for
B) do everything possible to hide the fact that the hotel won't actually let you check in without paying an additional fee (sometimes hundreds of dollars) until you've already made a large non-refundable payment
C) lie to people's credit card companies when they dispute the charges
This isn't a legitimate business, it's a criminal enterprise.
This isn't a difficult concept.
Airbnb is basically just a prettier craigslist with a payment transfer mechanism and messaging. It isn't to say it isn't a great business, just that the "tech" part of it is not really much more than a web app.
Also engineering challenges aren’t always obvious from the consumer facing product. It is true that AirBnB founders have design backgrounds rather than engineering ones, but from what I’ve seen of their engineering and data science work, they would qualify as a tech company in my estimation. They did come up with Apache Airflow which is a well regarded data pipeline management system.
I'm just pointing out that the nature of Airbnb's business means that there's no real-time, no streaming, no billions of concurrent users, etc. The tech boils down to a 1) web app 2) payments mechanism and 3) messaging. Nothing particularly revolutionary on the tech side.
Internet schminternet.
The question is: if you sacked everyone but the core team who keeps the trains running, what would happen to the business?
They might but after all these years you still can't search for a room with a private bath despite the platform has the data and detail pages show it.
I'm trying to understand the underlying problem you're getting at. I haven't had trouble with getting places with my own bathroom though I do not stay in Airbnbs with multiple concurrent guests much.
A private room typically means you get your own bedroom but there are others living in the same home, maybe the owner, maybe other guests. Living room, kitchen are shared. The question is whether you also get a bathroom for your own use or not. This is displayed even in the listing (4 guests · 1 bedroom · 1 bed · 1 shared bath vs 2 guests · 1 bedroom · 1 bed · 1 private bath) but you are unable to filter on it. They understand this detail is important enough to put it in the listing but you still can't filter on it.
And the reason this matters, well, that should be pretty evident: multiple strangers can be in a kitchen or a living at the same time but not in a bathroom. A shared bathroom is a botttleneck in the morning and an overall pain in the neck to be honest. And in some places the private room-private bath combo is by far the best value.
If you hate Hotel Tonight because of the fees, you shouldn't be staying at the hotel actually charging the fees.
I find it more stressful to stay at an airbnb.. lots of weird rules and policies to keep track of. Airbnb customer service is horrible when things go wrong.
The better Airbnb locations are managed by professional companies. Their prices tend to be high.
Nowadays, I consider staying in Airbnb only for a long trip with a lot of people when I can justify the time to thoroughly research the places. Otherwise, I prefer the consistent experience offered by Hilton/Hyatt/Marriott. Ironically it is relaxing for me to come back to the cookie cutter furnishings where I won't have to open 5 cabinets to find a coffee mug.
The early Airbnb days were great, because it was mostly people that were renting out their place while they traveled. They cared about their place and they wanted you to care about their place. It reminded me of how eBay was before it became just another marketplace, it was a more personal experience.
Every single bad Airbnb experience I've had has been with the people that are taking out second properties to rent on Airbnb as a business, so they are completely disconnected from it.
I totally understand why a business traveler would want consistency and simplicity. When traveling with family, I'm happy to pay more for the AirBNB experience, even if one of the adults has to sleep on a sofa bed in the living room, while the other is in a king bed with the kids. (Assuming a 1 bdrm rental. 2 bdrms is even better.)
That’s what we do with relatives, as it’s much more kid friendly than any other solution.
Once again, the issue is that HotelTonight deliberately implemented a dark pattern to hide the price. They know the fee amount. They display it. They could've shown it as part of the itemization, but they specifically did not.
Okay, hotel websites do this too? So what? TFA is about HotelTonight.
They should be fined or in jail.
Edit: from a US perspective, maybe things are better over the pond.
The resort fee is charged directly by the hotel.
I guess I’m not sure why it is necessary for a tech company to be defined by these criteria? That’s just me.
I'm just pointing out that Airbnb's application of "tech" isn't necessarily "hard" tech, relative to other companies that it's usually associated with or compared to in the SF startup scene.
I agree that predictable check-in is nice, and I will seek out AirBNBs with code-based checkins.
YMMV.
The hotel business is largely focused on the business traveler as their primary market. They only really build for pleasure-travel in non-business markets (see all the Condos available on Maui, or the Hyatt House hotels in Anaheim and Orlando, which have bunk-bed rooms for kids, etc.) AirBNB fell into serving this market, and it's served them pretty well, especially since they were priced below hotels to begin with, and pleasure travelers are much more price-sensitive than business travelers.
I would only use Airbnb for long stays when I need extra bedrooms. It just doesn't make sense for the traveling I do or for most business travel.
I’ve been thinking of doubling or trebling the cleaning fee and reducing my nightly rates lately to better mirror my costs: I spend almost as much time greeting and cleaning guests who stay two nights as those who stay two weeks, so I spend a lot more time in two weeks if I have multiple guests.
Upping the cleaning fee to $100-150 so it pays for my ‘greeting time’ as well sounds fairer for everyone: it’ll be cheaper for long term guests, as it should since they’re less work per day.
And I agree with Airbnb being like Ticketmaster in the fees department. It's insane. What's more annoying is that guests often attribute faults (like the fees, or the myriad of bugs in the app that makes hosting hard) to the hosts, not to Airbnb itself. The hosting experience is really painful.
I'm looking at hotels in Manhattan for this weekend and there's 4* hotels for $150/night. Is that expensive? That is equivalent to what some people pay in rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in SF or NY.
By the same logic, if you eat at a restaurant and it costs only 50% more than what it'd cost if you made it at home or order a beer at a bar and it only cost 50% more than what it'd cost if you bought it at the grocery store you'd be really happy, though chances are you're paying at least 100% more, if not more.
It would be "expensive" if you lived at a hotel in the same way it's "expensive" if for every meal or every beer you drank you had it at a sit down restaurant or bar.
If I have status either via frequent traveler program or credit card, they’ll reward me with points multipliers, upgrades, and free breakfast and lounges (free beverages, waters, and snacks). Marriott’s BonVoy program comes to mind.
Airbnb’s, on the other hand, have strict check-in and check-out times. Then I have to carry my luggage for the rest of the day from 11am checkout. And for Airbnb’s without a keypad entry system, I have to negotiate a check-in time with the host to obtain a key (and if I lose a key, I’ll owe a key deposit).
I also find them priced within comparable range to Airbnbs. Not that I advocate anyone doing this, but somebody could try a /[1-9]{1}[0-9]{3}/ brute force search for a SET code/corporate rate on Marriott :) It’s only 9,000 permutations to find a good rate... (SET code: 1000, 1001, 1002...9999)
Not every city is New York or SF with their crazy hotel prices. In expensive cities, I'll use points to save money.
I like airbnb for a couple of use cases:
- parts of cities without many hotels (usually means without much tourist attraction). You can stay near friends without imposing on them.
- transient events. E.g. PAX sucks up all the hotel rooms in Seattle and there are nice AirBnbs that show up along the "traditional" model (they aren't professionals but folks wanting to make a few extra bucks opportunistically). They tend to love a business booking as they know I'm not likely to smoke crack in the living room
Apart from those cases, these days a hotel is likely a better bet even if the cost is comparable.
I'm on what's considered a fairly good wage for my area (Melbourne), but if I were to do this it'd cost me close to 70% of my take home salary. Whereas I could rent a beautiful apartment right near the city for about 30%
My average nightly spend is about $119 all-in (I track it all in a spreadsheet). Market rent for my apartment in SF would be $4,500, i.e. $148/night, assuming every night is used. If you do any amount of traveling, the cost per night used of your apartment increases.
$125 can buy you some really really nice hotels. I've stayed at 5-star properties in Bangkok at that price. And if I'm willing to go limited service or 4 star (but still nice, I have standards), I've done stays as cheap as $45 in Bali, $65 in Kuala Lumpur, $80 in Bangkok, $125 in Taipei, etc. In China, I've stayed at St. Regis and Ws for barely over $100. I can pretty much always get something nice for under $200. I learn the tricks to lower rates through promotions and other programs like Citi's 4th night free or through TAs who have access to special rates.
Given how much time I spend in hotels, I have top status with three different chains (Hyatt, Marriott, and Hilton, and mid-tier status with IHG). That means I always get the best room available, and I've gotten some absolutely ridiculous suite upgrades (twice the size of my apartment). I also usually get free breakfast, access to a club lounge with free afternoon food and booze, late checkout, welcome gifts, and other perks.
With Hyatt and Marriott I have a dedicated team member to take care of any issues or requests. Basically, I get treated like a king by all of them, for the same price as my rent in SF.
For me, living in hotels full time, vs. $200+/night used in rent in SF… the decision was a no-brainer.
To the outside world it looks like your permanent address. I use mine to buy health insurance through Obamacare and also have registered my car to this address.
The other big annoyance about living as a full-time nomad is laundry. So far I've managed with a mix of laundromats, laundry shops, and the occasional hotel laundry when it's reasonably priced (rarely).
I've found that if I charge less for cleaning, then do less cleaning (I can usually turn my one-bedroom space in about 75 minutes, if I get the roomba started before I do), I'm happier, and the guests tolerate it. It's not hotel-quality, but I'm not providing a hotel, I'm providing a short term home.
Furthermore, I wouldn't say that the concierge or security are worth mentioning. I know personally I feel about as secure in a hotel as with an Airbnb - or at least I'm always aware of the possibility of theft from hotel rooms.
I understand labor costs etc are a big part of the price, but I wish there were more low-cost hotel options. Not hostels, but an actual room to yourself. Why does that have to be expensive? Just cut the room area in half and half the price! Yotel is nice, but they're still not cheap, and don't have many locations.
If there were low-cost hotels available, for $30 a night or so, I'd spring for them much more often. But when you can grab a nice-looking Airbnb for $25-30, vs a motel for $50-60, it's hard to justify the motel.
But sure it’s in $250 or so a night range.
I find dry cleaning to be cheap compared to the time I would spend doing laundry activities.
Ironing an expensive dress shirt with a rusty iron at an Airbnb is not something I want to entertain.
I haven't found a good solution for workout clothes though so I usually stay in an Airbnb with at least a washer.
More info / Wirecutter review: https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-mens-and-womens-under...
Hyatt: 80 nights in their hotels last year (5 from CC) Marriott: 105 nights in their hotels last year (10 from CC, 1 from birthday) + required $20k spend for Ambassador status
Hilton: credit card for Diamond IHG: credit card for Platinum, $200/yr to add Ambassador status
211 total hotel nights last year.
There's 365 nights in the year, enough to earn top status on every chain you want. I plan on adding Shangri-La to the mix this year.
After staying in a crack house in Barcelona, a dirty dark hole in Manhattan, a "private" villa in France where the owner was screwing an endless stream of boyfriends behind the flimsy kitchen door at 10AM, a thermite infested apartment in Sicily with horrid beds, I still feel like a total asshole when leaving a negative review. I'm not sure why I keep going back to it.
A place that turns out to be right on the noisy highway won't have a single review that points this out. Only "great for early risers!"
My strategy is to just not review if my review wouldn’t be positive.
Been using Airbnb quite a lot in Europe the last few months though and I have generally found some very high quality and accurately advertised listings — only had 1 that really fell below expectations.
In NYC all of the Airbnb inventory is bedbug-ridden hovels. Perhaps this simply reflects the housing stock of the region.
It does depend on more than just the city.
It really depends on the country. Israeli Airbnbs are usually not fantastic because people don't really know how to this stuff properly even if they are generally nice and want you to have a pleasant stay (and the prices are crazy). A well-chosen* airbnb in Ireland, on the other hand, is usually superb.
*Which entails trawling through several pages of reviews and looking for small details.
Thermite can't really infest things.
You probably mean “Thermian”.
(Ok, more likely: “termite”.)
I hope you meant termite [0] and not thermite [1]
I sometimes wish I could use thermite against some infestations... wouldn't be surprised if cockroaches evolved to survive that too.
But hotels do the exact same thing. I don't see how that's super incredible?
For me, there have been several rare occasions when I needed a room at last minute, but HotelTonight was never actually cheaper than any other aggregators or booking directly with the hotel. All being equal I vastly prefer booking direct so I get my points and elite benefits. I guess they have a fancy interface, and that's... it? Maybe it's market dependent (I only tried it in NYC and SF)?
B. is the 7th largest internet company in the world but because it’s in Amsterdam and not US based, hardly anyone think about them. They have incredible technology, often on-par with the big ones but I’m not anyone here could name one problem where they pionnered a solution.
Disclaimer: I used to work for one of their subsidiaries.
I really hope that's the case, I love Hotel Tonight but will absolutely stop using it if I end up getting someone's condo. Regardless, I'm worried that hotel selection will go way down. They keep emphasizing boutique hotels, but that's not people go to Hotel Tonight for. I could definitely see large hotel chains not wanting to do business with Airbnb though...
1. Buy company
2. Draft press release saying "nothing to see here, folks"
3. Wait a year
4. Company absorbs what they like, discards the rest
So it's good for them to get the constant business (similarly to how Groupon works) but I can't help but feel that more of that $20 should have gone to the hotel staff, especially maids doing the actual work of cleaning up after everyone.
To me, running a bunch of web services to book rooms could be done on a properly configured computer taking 10,000 reservations a second for ~$10 per month. So the cost for booking apps has got to be mostly logistical (getting hotels onboarded with the organization, paying for liabilities, etc).
My question is, will competition in these spaces ever lower the fees and free up more money for labor? Or are we entering an endgame where labor gets relegated to the shadows?
To be sure, I'm not arguing there isn't a lot of waste at these large companies, but running a large eCommerce business at scale is a hugely complicated endeavor. For one, the economics of large OTAs mean that very small increases in conversion rates can result in huge increases in revenue, so they all have very large teams optimizing their sites, running a ton of A/B tests, optimizing their search advertising bidding, etc.
Yes, it definitely would be possible to build a fairly straightforward hotel booking site with a very small number of people. To do it in a way that makes any money is a much more difficult problem.
I travel a lot for work (100+ nights per year).
Sometimes I stay for 2+ nights, often it's just a 1-night stop over.
For 2+ nights, I almost always go with an AirBnB - more space to cook/work/think etc.
For 1 night though, AirBnBs are too much hassle. I don't want to have to choose a great location from a long list which includes some terrible options. I just want a clean bed, bathroom and decent wifi in a good location. HotelTonight gets me that in under 30s.
I'm not sure how AirBnB locations can/will be built into HotelTonight - after all HotelTonight is all about ease of use, low friction and flexibility. The very things AirBnBs are bad at (coordinating check in times etc).
I expect them to just show hotel tonight data in the airbnb interface. From the press release:
> We are making it easier for people who use Airbnb to find last-minute places to stay when Home hosts are often already booked. The availability of boutique hotels—in addition to private rooms and entire homes that are instantly bookable—helps ensure authentic, high-quality stays are available on-demand, especially at the last minute.
I think about it this way all the time: AirBnB bought the product for X price, because they think it will help them make Y more money. They don't even need to "merge" as long as the product is profitable but if they can get even 1% more with a cross over, then AirBnB (the parent co) is making even more money (with more risk ofc)
Every OTA does last minute bookings now...reality is what they offer has been largely commoditized.
My anecdotal understanding was that HotelTonight was doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Some component of that $130m may have been secondary stock sale.
I don't think we have enough data to determine what the price might have been, or how well employees will do.
Family trips are always in apartments. It's just nicer than Hotels.
Also, I find hotels pretty sad in general but that's maybe because I worked in some:)
Edit: typo
I've had great success finding good places to stay by using AirBnb as a catalogue, then Googling the property and booking through the owner's own website. Last year we stayed in a lovely house in Bruges for less than half the price it would have been if I'd booked through AirBnb.
A big player acquiring an orthogonal product...most likely meaning they'll just kill it. I doubt hotels will partner with AirBnB on a booking service.
I absolutely love it.
- You can trust that the hotels are good enough. Never had a bad experience
- Takes <15s to book
- They have their own rewards system which really starts to add up the more you use it
- They may never give you the absolute cheapest option available in that city for that night, but you'll get an amazing deal on a higher-quality hotel
- My experience using other booking sites for 'cheap deals' has been that you're often treated as a lower-tier customer, for example being given worse rooms (ground floor, no windows etc). The HotelTonight experience is the opposite. ~25% of the time, I receive a room upgrade without asking
- No hidden charges
I'm not a person who is loyal to a brand by nature. But HotelTonight is the closest I've come to feeling that way so far.
They're all OTAs. You're just as likely to get a "good" room with HotelTonight as you would with Priceline, Hotwire, etc. The quality of room you receive is mostly dependent on room availability and the check-in agent.
Maybe it changed in the mean time, but googling "airbnb phone number" showed it right in the search page. That info came from https://www.airbnb.com/help/contact_us, wherein clicking "It's something else" shows a "Call us" option, which has the number.
You get decent discounts with their loyalty program, which doesn't work with points, but just tracks your spend on the platform and levels you up as you spend more.
I think a huge factor for me using it is their customer service. You can text them via the app over anything and they'll respond back pretty quick. You also get upgraded "concierge" service as you level up, though I didn't find this to be that much better.
I'm worried that AirBnb will ruin HT since they have such horrible customer service. Hopefully they don't. It's nice not planning your hotels far in advance, land in a city, and take it from there.
I did this 7 different times all around France. It was a perfect experience. The fact that the UI/UX makes super duper easy to view, book, set, & forget. I think its better than opening a chrome tab or any other mobile app thus far.
Don't even try to compare to other sites desktop experience. I can book everything before you would launch a chrome tab. Lastly, every time I showed up to the reserved hotel (usually later), everything was taken care of and never was my reservation, lost, not taken, or a problem with rooms. THE UI/UX is the reason this app is so amazing.
If you're trying to find a comfortable and quiet bed after 2 flights and a train, airbnb, even with "book it now" is a nightmare waiting/organizing game, direct booking in foreign languages with different tax/fee structures can be really confusing.
For instance, in Paris I ended up in a $450/ni 5 star hotel, and was ~$30 away from playing french phone tag for a room in a shared airbnb apartment.
I think every major hotel chain guarantees that their direct price is the lowest, and why wouldn't it be when there is no middleman, so why go anywhere else when you've found the hotel you want?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_Key
Edit: I'm going to have to retract my comments about cheapest price being on official hotel brand websites. I did a cursory search and find many cheaper options on Hotel Tonight (and expedia) for same day reservations than the brands, and while I haven't looked at all the brand's best price guarantees, at least IHG's exempts them from having to provide the lowest price within 24 hours of checkin, so it seems like a loophole to let them dump rooms for cheaper on third party websites day of arrival.
People at some point realized this though and the individual hotel sites had to promise to be the cheapest to hope to get visitors at all.
that is the hard bit right? I guess you can showroom with expedia etc then book with the hotel direct.
I'm concerned, like others, that contracts and deals will evaporate as they end (as part of AirBnB)
I hope they keep HT as clean as it has been as the regular Airbnb experience is starting to feel like Booking.com; hidden fees and endless fake sense of urgency among other growth tactics.
This news is devastating. My least favorite lodging company just bought my most favorite.
My question would be -- what other apps provide an experience close to what HT did?
One time my wife and I had way too much to drink and surprisingly, even in the middle of nowhere Ohio (Cedar Point) I was able to book a place right near the park from my phone while waiting in line for a rollercoaster. Very rad.
Big feature: geo-specific deals. Makes sense from a business perspective as it's Hotel Tonight, which mean hotels may have excess inventory near you for that night who's rate could be instantly negotiated down.
Changes the whole travel calculation, do you book ahead for peace of mind or wait until the night of to see if you get a good geo-specific deal?
The points and perks are also an added benefit, like not having to physically checkout at the front-desk for certain hotels once you've attained a "perk level" (read: loyalty points).
I will say I'm a little tepid about this deal, although very happy for the HT folk for what hopefully is a decent exit. I hope this only helps the app grow and offer more features and stay true to core, although it will likely be absorbed into the Airbnb app experience
Booked a solid $134 room in Leicester Square at about 3pm same day. Went great.
Booked an $82 room at an EWR hotel, a little cheaper than other OTA rates including apaglobal. Went fine.
They seemed to have access to consolidator-style inventory at rates lower than I found in the markets where I was looking on the dates where I was looking.
Ive also used it in LA, SF, bumfuck Arizona, etc. Each time I got better deals. But I used it to find hotels day of.
Agreed that points and benefits not being given sucks, but that's the case with any 3rd party. HT's loyalty definitely adds up, though.
I'm hoping this is basically the expansion that happens. When hosts have emergencies, AirBnB can offer a local backup :)
Where it is fantastic is in UX. It is simple, clean and staggeringly efficient. And I've used it on three continents equally well.
I'm in Miami/Orlando.
It was pretty quick and easy.
The room and the hotel were meh.
By what measure? Just checked and it's not market cap, not revenue, not number of employees, and not earnings.
Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, Alibaba would be the huge ones. Then Salesforce, PayPal. Don’t know Alipay and Uber market cap space yet if they are internet companies.
I don’t know if you can include companies like Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco as internet companies. If you include Microsoft, still puts Booking into top 10.
Fun fact from some years ago: It used to be a head-to-head race for 2nd between Booking and Ebay (when ebay was at their peak and included PayPal).
PS: dealing with hotels is playing with decades old technology. I think they’re doomed to keep a flexible and tried and true stack to deal with all the atrocities they’ll have to adjust to.
Doesn't help what exactly? Lots of Amazon.com still runs in perl so not sure why this matters.
Having every hotel on the planet requires some very heavy-handed growth teams and they have impressive talent there. It also requires to develop very flexible solutions and, even of the main code-base has some problem, that flexibility is worth mentioning.
There are three areas where I’ve seen some world-class internal products (on par with what I’ve seen at Facebook): data engineering, A/B testing, Machine learning hosting and serving. I’ve asked them to open-source and started what I could to help them do that, but they are far from being able to do it.
This user's perspective is the opposite.
Also as they are one of the king of the hill, any move in the market is basically a move against them. For now at least I am not sure there will be that much impact.
HotelTonight has been awesome there. You can get a representative on live chat and resolve most issues while you're still en-route from the airport.
On one hand, I am hopeful Airbnb will be able to learn from HotelTonight, but in reality, it seems most acquisitions end up with the acquired company diffusing into nothingness :(
(Not affiliated with AirBnb, but I had a chat with the tech lead of their business travel team last year).
The HotelTonight acquisition seems like it's a way to more rapidly scale their hotel inventory than anything else, although I suppose last-minute travel may simply be better served by hotels than home-sharing.
There's a lot of cases where a hotel makes sense, such as short trips (especially if it's just one night), or business travel (some companies have policies that exclude non-hotel stays from reimbursement for safety concerns), and so on.
You don't want to send these customers elsewhere.
Found one article mentioning this [1].
Edit: but could be these don’t apply to last minute or same day reservation. Looks like for example Hotels.com best price guarantee excludes these.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2018/sep/15/australians-t...
If you’re a biz traveler and your flight is delayed or getting in late the comfort of knowing you can enter a hotel that is big, easy to find, and lobby open and attended to 24/7 is much more comforting than anything you can book on Airbnb. It’s hard to argue with.
I encourage anyone to post real honest, negative reviews if the experience is indeed bad. Airbnb seems to do a good job building the system, and I feel guests are protected quite well, from a host’s perspective. Honest reviews help good hosts, and I would think I’m one of them :)
Yes, often. I'll check there first at least.
If it's a special occasion (Valentine's Day for example) I'll probably use another booking platform.
> Have you ever run into problems finding a room or being forced to take a room in a distant part of town?
Yes, never been worse than the main booking sites though. I was in SF at the same time as the Salesforce conference was taking place a few years back, for example. Nothing available anywhere.
Like Facebook. Some things are rotten to the core.
The customer service agent refused to remove the review.
Can't speak for every hotel (obviously), but I know for a fact this isn't true for several.
Hotels always have better and worse rooms - it's very rare to have a building where there isn't a loud/dark/musty room or two.
In most hotels where I know a member of staff, they freely admit to having several 'worse' rooms which are given to booking.com/priceline etc guests first, regardless of availability.
They purposefully save a few 'better' rooms in case valued customers show up last minute. For some reason, HT customers get lumped into this category - maybe because it's assumed they have the purchasing power to become a 'real' customer in the future (but that's just a guess).
You don't think Hotel Tonight is lumped in there with booking.com and Priceline? They're all OTAs. They're all treated the same.
That's a nice feature. I don't think I've ever booked a hotel that fast.
Booking has received tremendous regulatory/legal scrutiny on that group of features and they wouldn't be caught red handed doing something indefensible in that space. That being said, there are clearly some decisions to be made about what "currently looking at" means: As engineers, we all know that nothing is tracking user eyeballs (thankfully), so in reality these things are necessarily implemented as a rolling sum of non-bot page views within X minutes.
Whether or not the information is correct, of course, doesn't mean anybody has to like the feature. I personally really don't like it, but acknowledge that it was a feature with shockingly significant business impact when first released.
Source: Used to work there. Read the respective code at the time (~2015/2016 or so).
I have heard several other sites where the number is a lot more… interpretative.
Edit: I'm going to have to retract my comments about cheapest price being on official hotel brand websites. I did a cursory search and find many cheaper options on Hotel Tonight (and expedia) for same day reservations than the brands, and while I haven't looked at all the brand's best price guarantees, at least IHG's exempts them from having to provide the lowest price within 24 hours of checkin, so it seems like a loophole to let them dump rooms for cheaper on third party websites day of arrival.
Have found the same for airline flights. Google Flights showed me a flight on Delta and provided a link that was much cheaper than I could find on their own site.
Absolutely no problems with either reservation. Not sure why people would go direct unless it's their employer's policy or something.
Let's say HotelTonight was acquired for $500 mln. How much of that the founders could get at most based on the last valuation?
Edit: I'm going to have to retract my comments about cheapest price being on official hotel brand websites. I did a cursory search and find many cheaper options on Hotel Tonight (and expedia) for same day reservations than the brands, and while I haven't looked at all the brand's best price guarantees, at least IHG's exempts them from having to provide the lowest price within 24 hours of checkin, so it seems like a loophole to let them dump rooms for cheaper on third party websites day of arrival.
https://www.ihg.com/hotels/us/en/customer-care/lowest-intern...
https://hiltonworldwide3.hilton.com/en/best-price-guarantee/...
https://www.marriott.com/online-hotel-booking.mi
https://www.choicehotels.com/deals/best-rate
https://www.wyndhamhotels.com/wyndham/hotel-deals/best-rate-...
https://www.hyatt.com/info/best-rate-guarantee
Edit: I'm going to have to retract my comments about cheapest price being on official hotel brand websites. I did a cursory search and find many cheaper options on Hotel Tonight (and expedia) for same day reservations than the brands, and while I haven't looked at all the brand's best price guarantees, at least IHG's exempts them from having to provide the lowest price within 24 hours of checkin, so it seems like a loophole to let them dump rooms for cheaper on third party websites day of arrival.
Yes, for some specific hotels that don't belong to a big brand, it makes sense for them to price discriminate so that the person willing to pay $500 doesn't end up paying $200, but on the level that the big brands operate, it doesn't make sense to give up 15% of gross revenue for that reason, especially when they have better ways to price discriminate by tiering their rewards members and the rate at which people earn points.
Edit: As jonknee pointed out in another post, the ihg.com price for Kimpton Monaco in Seattle is higher than the hotel tonight price, and by quite a bit, and there's a carveout in the best price guarantee for rooms reserved within 24 hours of checkin. So I guess the best price guarantees aren't really worth much...
The most obvious example I had using it was when I missed a flight and it was rebooked for the next morning. I was tired and I remember getting in a cab/Uber and finding out the friend who dropped me off wasn't able to let me crash there for the night. Before we had left the airport I had booked a room nearby and could direct the driver there. The hotel was nice. I might have had to wait 10m for the hotel to receive a fax confirming my booking (faxing reservations seems to be pretty common with a lot of hotels).
There's no way I could have done that booking directly. It would have taken me 10x as long to figure out which hotels were nearby, near my cost, what rooms were available, and check out. I do those things when booking ahead of time, but they're also much harder to do on a phone.
I'll be bummed if it I lose this contingency.
I just pulled up the reservation. It was in 2013 to a Fairfield/Marriott 3 miles from the airport.
For an example of the types of hotels, the other two bookings I've made were to Sonesta ES Suites in 2014 (during a surprise blizzard) and a Four Points/Sheraton in 2015.
If I had status or points I'd probably check out that chain first. Since I don't, sticking with a single chain isn't the most convenient or the cheapest.
The Best Price Guarantee is largely a lie. It's a Best Price Guarantee on a rack-rate rooms. The problem is most OTAs will offer a significant discount (sometimes more than 50%) for a non-refundable room. The rooms are exactly the same, they just classify them differently, so they don't have to actually have the best price.
I find it a lot easier to find $250 “bargains” in Manhattan these days than in SF. Recent event I ended up couch surfing with friends rather than pay $650/night there.
Another example: I just checked HT for San Francisco tonight and the Hyatt Regency is up for $179 after taxes and fees. On Hyatt.com it's $259.
Edit: I'm going to have to retract my comments about cheapest price being on official hotel brand websites. I did a cursory search and find many cheaper options on Hotel Tonight (and expedia) for same day reservations than the brands, and while I haven't looked at all the brand's best price guarantees, at least IHG's exempts them from having to provide the lowest price within 24 hours of checkin, so it seems like a loophole to let them dump rooms for cheaper on third party websites day of arrival.
I just pulled it up for Seattle and the Kimpton Monaco is up for $115, $140 after taxes and fees. From the Kimpton website it's $208 or $264 after taxes and fees. So about half off, pretty good deal! This was just the first one in the list, there may be better deals.
5. Find a Lower Rate. If you find a lower rate on an eligible, non-IHG website within 24 hours of making your reservation on the IHG direct channel, and it is more than 24 hours before the standard check-in time for the hotel where you made your reservation, tell us about it by completing and submitting the online claim form (“Claim Form”). We will verify the lower rate by comparing the rate found on the IHG website or mobile app with the rate found on the non-IHG website for the same hotel, room type, stay dates, number of guests, and cancellation policy.
I'm actually shocked that they would do that, because now I will definitely shop around, I had erroneously thought their best price guarantee would save time.
Same price across all 3 sites.
Chances are, if you see a price lower than the major travel sites, they're losing money. In this case, they're the same price.
I didn't mean they were the first to do deals but nobody cares about that anyway. Users only care if it works for them, and HT has one of the smoothest apps with some of the biggest discounts. When I started using HT years ago, I could book a room in less than a minute at a lower price than any other online source.
Anyways, as to the original point, they might have lost money on some deals but not all of them, and this is directly from private hotel owners I spoke with.