[lasgsf]

Not an employee but overall I am quite bullish on Airbnb as ironically they will be the definition of a what a post-covid travel company will become. Couple points in their favour:

1. Work from home becomes work from anywhere: The WFH trend is here to stay and will grow. If you have an option why not stay anywhere in world and work vs. close by home? I expect we will see a big % of WFH markets be global travelers. Proving this thesis would be Airbnb can show on S1 the % of guest who book outside their home location and for stays more then 2 weeks (to account that it is not simply vacation time).

2. Stays gravitating to Tier 2 or lower vs. Tier 1: People will not want to fly or be close to other folks so you will see travel go to Tier 2 or lower cities. This helps Airbnb in two ways.. less competition as these cities won't have as much hotels...second allows them to increase their breadth of revenue based across many more cities then being dependant on just Tier 1 which have risk (regulation, disaster, etc.). Show this on S1 by % of travel that is now on Tier 2 and lower markets and how this has grown as a proportion of your overall revenue base.

3. Safety: Simple it's getting close to accepted that the #1 way of covid transmission is via airborne. Based on this you as a traveler should want to minimize as much unnecessary humans interaction as possible thus hotels suck with all the traffic that is there. You may argue that hotels have policy that are more strict on cleaning but this doesn't mean much when the way to catch covid is via airseol.

4. Inventory: With the economy still in shambles they will get more host who will monetize their living assets more and thus provide more inventory.

I could go on and on but thats my thesis.

[Guest19023892]

> If you have an option why not stay anywhere in world and work vs. close by home? I expect we will see a big % of WFH markets be global travelers.

Well, if a business is allowing their employees to work from home due to COVID, they don't want them traveling off abroad and being classified as tax residents of various countries.

If people are moving to cheaper cities or locations in their own country, getting a long term Airbnb isn't very practical. Most will use whatever real estate listing website or service that is prevalent in their region.

[dijit]

FWIW in most countries you dont become tax resident until you've been there more than 3 months, in some cases 6.

source: I work(ed) for an international company and missions were somewhat commonplace, you get paid from your subsidiary unless you're there for longer than 3mo.

[taurath]

Problem is you’ll probably be on a tourist rather than work visa.

[9nGQluzmnq3M]

Working for a foreign company that's paying you in a different country is a grey area. Many countries have business visas that allow "business" but prohibit "work", with the main (but not sole) determinant being whether you're paid locally.

Some countries are also starting to offer long-stay remote work visas: https://www.traveller.com.au/countries-such-as-barbados-to-o...

[rubber_duck]

>Well, if a business is allowing their employees to work from home due to COVID, they don't want them traveling off abroad and being classified as tax residents of various countries.

You would need to stay somewhere 6+ months in a year to be classified as a tax resident so I don't see that being relevant to Airbnb.

1-3 month work from different places would be what I would be doing right now if my wife wasn't pregnant, but as someone who did it when the lockdown started (moved from inland to island for 2 weeks) the cut they take on that duration makes it worth searching local advertising sites. The bigger issue is that most rentals suck for work compared to a decent home office set-up

[jariel]

?

They are being devastated by COVID which could linger for a while.

Their biggest risk is regulatory and taxation. Many AirBnBs are illegal, and what will really grind government to act are the potential lost revenues.

I think they will do just fine, it's a matter of valuation.

[an_opabinia]

Of the last $5,000 I’ve spent on AirBnB, not a single dollar was spent on a legal host.

[vadym909]

I didn't know this was a thing until my friend said he stayed in a guest room of a small country's embassy in SF that the host probably never had permission to rent out.

[qppo]

You haven't lived until you find out your host lied about the address so it wouldn't tip off their landlord, who forbid it in their lease

[zebnyc]

Had this very experience happen to me a few years back. Took a cab to the advertised address. Door locked. So I call the host and the host gives us a different address.

Catch a taxi to the other address and report it to Airbnb along with a request for cab refund (Airbnb just ignored the request). Host just started listing in a different address afterwards.

[jariel]

Uber and AirBnB have revealed that the Western World is far more lawless than we had imagined.

Who knew you could just 'start running cabs'.

Even city hall says 'no' ... they just keep going.

It's really bizarre.

Irrespective of whether or now we should allow AirBnB and Uber it's crazy that civic institutions seem to have no control.

If I was mayor and we decided 'no' on Uber I would be fining Uber millions and individual drivers a lot and ask regular cabs and cops to be on the lookout.

It's mind blowing how much tax revenue is being missed out on, and how much money is flying out of the country.

[MattGaiser]

I think it is just Western democracy at work.

City Hall says 'no' and then they get a barrage of letters and emails demanding they don't hurt Uber or Airbnb as people love them. City Council doesn't want to have the deal with the fight, so they capitulate.

> If I was mayor and we decided 'no' on Uber I would be fining Uber millions and individual drivers a lot and ask regular cabs and cops to be on the lookout.

Are you prepared to deal with angry petitions and unhappy city councillors? Would you really be willing to put up the fight? Especially when there is virtually nobody in support of taxis and hotels?

[jariel]

" City Council doesn't want to have the deal with the fight, so they capitulate."

That is not what is happening.

What is happening is that they don't have the tools, wherewithal or leverage to implement their own policies.

They are operationally incapable.

[MattGaiser]

If people hated Uber, they would find the tools and wherewithal pretty quickly.

[unishark]

This is not new. Meanwhile many of those same cities declare themselves sanctuaries and refuse to cooperate with federal immigration law.

The US has always been partly "wild west", for better or worse.

[jobigoud]

> Uber and AirBnB have revealed that the Western World is far more lawless than we had imagined.

I think we discovered that around 2000 with Napster, Kazaa, etc.

[throwaway_pdp09]

> Uber and AirBnB have revealed that the Western World is far more lawless than we had imagined.

What an extraordinary extrapolation.

[jariel]

The lawlessness of Uber and AirBnB is not extrapolated, it's real. Ergo, Western Cities are lawless.

City of Montreal has all sorts of rules against AirBnB and Uber and yet ... it still exists.

[throwaway_pdp09]

And in eastern cities, someone picks a pocket. So that illegality means an equal amount of lawlessness there as here, right? Because all lawbreaking is equal, right?

(You may have a point about montreal, could you post some links to the laws against uber and Abnb)

[asdff]

if you were mayor in a city like LA you wouldn't have the ability to do anything really unless you had the council on your side, some of whom are currently being charged by the FBI in a corruption probe. Chicago is even worse. Most city governments are completely hobbled by design, powerless, and corrupted.

[esoterica]

The defining feature of a cab is that you can hail one down on the street. If you summon one through an app, it’s a car service, it a cab, and car services have never been subject to the same regulations as cabs.

The real reason mayors don’t crack down on Ubers is that their constituents love them and any mayor that tried to outright ban them would become very unpopular very quickly. Welcome to living in a democracy.

Airbnbs are somewhat more tenuous politically because the people who use them are from out of town and don’t vote in local elections.

[thesimon]

> Their biggest risk is regulatory and taxation. Many AirBnBs are illegal, and what will really grind government to act are the potential lost revenues

And if they are legal, they tend to be a bit boring.

When I look at some cities, agencies rent out tons of flat commercially. In In Porto I found over 100+ flats managed by one agency, they were dominating the list.

airbnb is not so interesting anymore when the flats look all the same worldwide, you never see the actual owner and the person checking you in has no real connection with the apartment and can't help you with issues too much.

[xoxoy]

the number of people who will hop from one airbnb to the next during some unknown WFH period is absurdly small

[hajola]

Why do you assume that? Are there any papers/data available on the subject?

I have met quite a few digital nomads, who do just that.

[wdb]

Are there any sites to help digital nomads with sorting out work visas?

[eanzenberg]

Covid is going away in 6-12 months. I wouldn’t stake a long term business proposal on it.

[closeparen]

We’re certainly not going to control it in the US with anything short of a vaccine. And that’s an extremely aggressive timeline even assuming that long term protective immunity is possible, that one of the current vaccine candidates is safe and effective, that we can make enough of it, and that people will take it.

[miked85]

> Covid is going away in 6-12 months.

I think it will take a lot longer than that for people's behaviors to change back though.

[twblalock]

People are already behaving like they did before. That's why the case counts have been rising so fast nationwide.

[taurath]

They had a thriving business model before it, and there won’t be fewer WFH people after Covid

[piva00]

Thriving business model while the slow cooker of regulations don't catch up to them.

There are reports of some touristic cities starting to cap Airbnb rentals, or just outright outlawing them. It's for good measure, Airbnbs in Barcelona, Lisboa and a number of other European cities have priced out the local population, investors buying 4-10 apartments on the same house to rent out as short-term rentals.

Airbnb created a pressure in the housing market that didn't exist before, for cities that already suffered with housing it really really sucks.

So it's the same as Uber: get into a regulatory grey area, capture the market and then fight over so regulations don't catch up with you. The whole business model of Airbnb was based on avoiding regulations, landlords have used this to prop up their short-term profits as it's much more profitable to rent out an Airbnb in Barcelona for 7-10 days per season-month than renting it out long-term monthly throughout the year.

[collyw]

Renting and buying property was already a pain in the arse in Barcelona before Airbnb, but they certainly didn't help.

[thesimon]

> Airbnbs in Barcelona, Lisboa

Lots of places in Lisbon list their AL number, indicating they are registered places for renting out.

Locals have been priced out of Lisbon for a long time, but seems like restricting airbnbs has not limited it too much.

[odshoifsdhfs]

Can't say for Lisboa, but in Algarve, half of those AL numbers aren't the actual owners. AL numbers actually work with residents/landlords and they rent the place, but it isn't owned by them, and give a cut to the owners.

(Know a few friends that would bunch up together in a house for July/August as 'entrepreneurs' would offer them 1-2K for their house for those two months to manage it and rent it themselves in AirBnB and other platforms)

[unishark]

Illegal taxis and rental housing (whether short or long term) have been around forever though. And they weren't just a fringe thing. College students and immigrant groups may predominantly use them in many places. If there's a current increase in such things, I'd blame it on the factors and regulations restricting the legal supply of these things rather than on airbnb/uber.

[piva00]

Illegal child pornography, terrorism radicalisation and other modern issues have also been around forever, it doesn't mean that the scale and leverage of the internet haven't made it worse, at least in tooling.

The same applies to illegal taxis and housing, yes, they were problems before but you didn't have a centralised global network of rentals (many illegal) connecting to the market of people looking for accommodation. The scale is the problem here.

[unishark]

> Illegal child pornography, terrorism radicalisation and other modern issues have also been around forever, it doesn't mean that the scale and leverage of the internet haven't made it worse, at least in tooling.

Ergo I can't disprove causation with my argument? I certainly concede that. For one thing it's a negative, not to mention the fact that you can't prove causation either. But then I don't concede it should be assumed true unless proven otherwise. Further, I can make arguments against it of course. And I made not one, but three: that it existed already, it was not a fringe activity (like, say, terrorism or child porn), and three that effects blamed on uber/airbnb can be explained by larger cultural changes. I think there's a bias in these arguments towards the experience of a certain group of people who actually travel the world and use apps to do so.

[maccard]

> If there's a current increase in such things, I'd blame it on the factors and regulations restricting the legal supply of these things rather than on airbnb/uber.

Curious, do you live in a city that's affected by this? I live in Edinburgh, and it's a massive problem here, almost entirely due to AirBnb. It's widely reported on pretty much every news source in the UK that the cause of this issue is Airbnb's (and other short term holiday lets), in a massive number of cases operating illegally (last number I saw was that <100 of the 7000+ lets in the 100sq miles of Edinburgh were legally registered)

[oh-4-fucks-sake]

Right. Not to mention pent-up demand for leisure travel.

I invest almost exclusively in funds because owning even one individual stock highly-disproportionally overweights your portfolio into that stock.

I might have to make an exception for AirBnb.

[puranjay]

One reason why I might gravitate towards Airbnb over a bigger hotel is that atleast in my country, larger hotels have central air conditioning, while Airbnbs usually don't. This makes them far safer as far as Covid transmission is concerned

[riffraff]

counterpoint: your larger hotel probably has to uphold some sanitary regulation, if only because they could get sued into oblivion if they didn't, while a random airbnb host likely does not.

[randomsearch]

A bit off topic but interested in (3). WHO thinks covid is most of entirely droplet and not aerosol spread. Do you have a link to the contrary please? Not the first time I’ve heard this opinion and I’m interested to see the evidence.