[reissbaker]

Booking.com, a major online hotel aggregator and probably more akin to Airbnb than a physical hotel chain, has a market cap of $85B — not far off from Airbnb's $100B.

I don't think individual hotel chains are an equivalent business to Airbnb, since those have high real estate costs and have clear physical hurdles to growth: you have to buy property and build hotels, and staff all of them to run the front desk, carry people's luggage, clean the rooms, do laundry, etc. The comparison to other OTAs like Booking — that don't own the properties but make money from listing them and allowing booking — makes more sense IMO. The valuation looks a lot less frothy with those comparisons.

(I am an ex-Airbnb employee and still hold many shares FWIW.)

[notahacker]

I agree, but I also think the valuations of certain OTAs also look frothy compared with digital distribution platforms with comparable cost bases and scale and arguably better moats. Sabre's market cap is under $4bn.