Analysis Shows Hotels Are Not Losing Share to Airbnb

Kevin Donahue
Hostfully
Published in
2 min readOct 13, 2016

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AirBNB has been regarded as the great disrupter in the hospitality sector, but a new study shows that — for all the hype — AirBNB is not taking marketshare away from hotels.

The study, compiled by Smith Travel Research using AirBNB source data, offers critical insights into the true market penetration for the room-sharing service.

Among the key findings:

  • AirBNB has 2.3 million listings, far more than the world’s largest hotel company, Marriott (1.1 million). However, much of AirBNB’s inventory is available only in peak-season, not year-round.
  • Airbnb has higher peak-season occupancy because its users skew more heavily to leisure. Hotels have much higher year-round occupancy due to the diverse nature of their business (leisure, business, and group).
  • The markets with the highest hotel occupancy also have AirBNB’s top occupancies. A deeper analysis shows that AirBNB is capturing excess demand, not shifting share.
  • Even on highest compression nights (hotel occupancy >95%) hotels are growing compression ADR faster than ever — at 35% in 2015 — with ADRs far exceeding those of AirBNB.

Jan Freitag, senior VP of lodging insights for STR, said that hoteliers are not at significant risk to lose share to AirBNB.

“I think the overall message is that the U.S. hotels industry continues to break demand records,” said Freitag. “We are selling more rooms than ever before on an annualized basis. In 2014, we had a demand record. We had another demand record in 2015. We expect in 2016 we will also top the number of rooms sold. Room demand has been higher than it has ever been.”

Originally published at Kevin Donahue.

Editor’s Note: Content published in this article, authors’ views are their own.

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Husband. Father. Dir of Sales & Marketing @ Ritz-Carlton, Amelia Island. I'm passionate about travel, college football, beach bars & tacos! www.kevindonahue.com