[alpha_squared]

I think the key here is the brand, which does go a long way. When traveling to a new place, I don't know what to look up to find whole-place rentals in the area and Airbnb is a default to finding what's in the area. In that way, Airbnb's value is in its listing/"aggregation" platform, not necessarily the listings themselves. After all, there's very little to stop a competitor from cloning Airbnb's model (and those clones do exist).

Personally, while I default to Airbnb's for finding stays when I travel, I've found myself gravitating back towards hotels as of late because they were generally better value propositions for what I was looking for.