Venturing deeper into the "dark side" of hospitality, they said.

The hotel industry has been dazed, confused, and overall fragmented about the impact of Airbnb on their business.  On one hand, you have hotels citing they are disadvantaged and their unions accusing Airbnb of creating a reduction in hotel jobs.  On the other, you have a few top tier hotel chains that claim Airbnb is not a threat, including a VP that hasn't even heard of Airbnb's existence.
Seriously?  I'm sure that VP has been educated in recent weeks.

These days it seems the hotel resistance is beginning to take on a new cohesive shape.  Tnooz reports of the American Hotel & Lodging Association mobilizing its 52,000 members to battle against the evil doings of short term rental companies and websites like Airbnb.  A brief snippet of their objective:

Together with our partner states, identifying target cities and localities where we can engage in select tax, safety, and health fights at the council level to pre-empt other deals being sought by short-term online rental companies.

Maybe Brian Chesky's "fuck hotels" frontback pic may have been the straw that broke the camel's back.

As tensions continue to mount between Airbnb and the hotel industry, I've experienced an increase in light-hearted trash talking from my fellow Cornell hotel school grads who are always so quick to point out my first crossover to the dark side with Expedia, and now ever darker having recently joined Airbnb.

I still love the majesty and cultural richness of many hotels, and I believe that the basic principles of hospitality remain a strong common denominator between hotels and Airbnb.  But perhaps that's a bit too philosophical for most executives when it comes down to market share and financial statements.

From my point of view, it's not at all dark on this side.  In fact, the future is really bright thanks to visionary leaders like Brian who want to create Shared Cities all over the world, "rogue" hoteliers like the legendary Chip Conley who inspired me a decade ago to pursue hospitality as a career, and a deeply passionate and energetic Airbnb team working together with so much love for what they are doing.

I may have to kiss my Cornell Hotel Society hopes goodbye, but helping build Airbnb's vision to create shared cities and provide travelers uniquely local experiences is going to be oh so much sweeter.  :-)

Did Google just take a monster step towards becoming an OTA?

There's been a lot of press the past couple days on Google's licensing deal with Room 77.  Some articles have been a bit bold in claiming that Google is entering the hotel booking business as an OTA. This would actually mean Google itself is transacting hotel bookings, which doesn't seem to be the case (just yet?).

There's also been a lot of hype over the big increase in Google's hotel content (photos, reviews, etc.) to make its search results resemble those of Priceline and Expedia, for example.  If I'm not mistaken though, this is part of a larger initiative to increase local business content across the board and isn't focused exclusively on hotels just for the sake of making them more bookable on Google search results.

But one thing is for sure . . . the more enhanced content Google adds, the more likely customers may begin their hotel search on Google versus the OTA sites.  And with the addition of Room 77's extensive database of hotel level information such as room views and floor plans, as well as its advanced hotel search algorithms, Google just may have made its biggest step yet in possibly becoming a full end-to-end hotel search and booking engine (and in the process eventually trumping TripAdvisor and OTAs).

I remain doubtful Google would get that low in the purchase funnel though.  My guess is they are amassing the best possible content at the hotel level in a drive to become the undisputed starting point for consumers doing a hotel search.  Over time, Google's hotel search volumes will increase, and if they can simultaneously ramp up ad spending from the non usual suspects (i.e. more hotels spending on adwords and not just the OTAs), it's plain simple math Google can squeeze billions more out of the travel vertical than it already makes today.

For now though, I can't help but wonder how Priceline and Expedia, some of Google's biggest adwords customers, feel about Google's licensing deal with Room 77 and what that might foreshadow.

Airbrb helps you monetize your empty work desk when you're away

Breaking news in the sharing economy!!!

Despite record revenue growth in their core business of short term property rentals, Airbnb is adding a new service that lets office workers rent out their office desks, amenities included.

If you're planning to take a vacation from work, hang out in the pantry, or do some extended reading on the can, Airbnb will help you rent out your office desk for a handsome sum until you get back.  It's magnificently called AirBRB.

 
Airbnb Presents: Airbrb from Airbnb on Vimeo.

Expedia gets sexier with a home page makeover, and smarter with full responsive design

I am totally digging Expedia's new homepage, although it's been overdue for a makeover.  The new design finally plays to the user's imagination instead of serving a plethora of often half ass travel deals all over the screen.

The sleekness and simplicity of the new Expedia homepage makes way for a more responsive design on a slew of mobile devices, but unfortunately many of Expedia's international sites haven't been touched up quite yet.  The Singapore site is below . . . see how busy the old design used to be?

While Expedia's new design comes a few steps closer to the visual dreaminess and slickness of Airbnb, its multi-product offerings of hotels, flights, packages, cars, cruises, and activities will make it tough to get much more uncluttered.

Update - Check out this tnooz post to see the evolution of Expedia's homepage design since 1996.

Now if only Orbitz will do the world a favor and tidy things up a bit on their homepage.  I mean seriously, how do I even make a search with all the merchandizing attacking me?  Although once you turn on your browser's ad blocker, Orbitz will undoubtedly have more white space than all the rest.

UberX makes a sneak preview in Singapore, with prices slashed in half

UberX was pretty much the only way I got around during my recent visit home to San Francisco.  And starting yesterday, it just might be the only way I get around Singapore from now on.

Uber has kicked off a beta of its lower cost UberX service in Singapore, where it previously offered only UberBlack cars.  If I'm not mistaken, this marks Asia's first taste of the lower cost service from Uber.

I'm not exactly sure how I got selected, but yours truly was among the fortunate ones with an opportunity to test drive the new UberX service.  I rejoiced after seeing the base fare slashed in half compared to UberBlack, and the per kilometer fare was more than half off.  At those prices, I'd be more than satisfied with a Camry or Corolla, which are the UberX cars currently being used, instead of the Mercedes or BMW sedans of UberBlack service.

But my smile was short lived.  The three times I fired up my Uber app, my estimated wait for an UberX to arrive at my pickup location was about 15 minutes on each attempt.   I'm hoping this will be improvd and maybe in a few weeks if/when more UberX drivers hit the road, this will become a non issue.

Uber has been a disruptor of local taxi companies since they first appeared on the streets with UberBlack.  They basically got licensed black car drivers with idle time to start picking up riders who might have otherwise booked or flagged down a normal cab.  Uber also changed the ball game with the most simple and easy to use mobile app for ride booking services.  Seriously, you just can't even compare the user experience on Uber's app with the clunky and ugly Comfort DelGro app.

Now UberX takes that disruption several degrees further by letting any Tom, Dick, or Harry become a driver without a special license.  Not only does this increase supply for consumers and increases competition with local cabs, but it also encourages drivers to drive for Uber instead of the local taxi companies (which could mean less revenue for those companies and also the government).  

I'm not sure if Singapore's UberX drivers are average people like you and me, or if they still hold valid operating licenses like their UberBlack limo driver counterparts.  Not that I really care though, as long as the fares continue to be half that of UberBlack here in Singapore.

Airbnb scores a gold medal at Sochi for real time marketing

If real time marketing were a sport, Airbnb would easily win the gold at Sochi this year for their responses to the trending #SochiProblems hashtag on Twitter.  Much like the epic fail of Olympic rings during the opening ceremony, the hashtag depicted hotels with epic fails including missing door handles, double toilets, questionable electrical wiring, and Johnny Quinn using his luge skills to break out of his locked bathroom door.

Once #SochiProblems started trending with examples of Sochi's dismal hospitality standards, Airbnb seized the opportunity to tweet about the stylish (and functional) lodging alternatives available on their site.  Some of these options greatly outshined the Sochi hotels, where the average score of the hotels on Tripadvisor is in the less than desirable range of 3 to 3.5 (out of 5).  To take it one step further, Airbnb even started sending tweets directly to journalists that had whined about their Sochi hotel problems, tempting them with descriptions and house porn photography of Airbnb listings where they could have been resting their heads at night. 

Although it's not really clear whether or not any of the journalists with #SochiProblems ended up swapping in their hotels from hell for an Airbnb listing, the vacation rental company will go home with the gold for offering a creative real time solution for those in need of a place to stay where the door to the room actually closes.  And unlike some of the hotels in Sochi, there won't be any spying going on in the bathrooms.

And if Airbnb gets a gold medal, then Sochi tourism places dead last.  With all the #SochiProblems broadcast all over the media, it's doubtful Sochi will get much of a prolonged tourism boost it's banking on after the Olympics are over.

Online travel and the underlying web of B2C and (many) B2B companies

Happy new year of the horse!  I'm celebrating Chinese New Year with my family in San Francisco bay area, followed by my first Startup Grind 2014 conference in Mountain View.

I won't have time to do much blogging in between my new year family feasts, but here's an interesting graphic I thought I could quickly share.  I came across this 'map' which helps categorize the various players and sub sectors within the travel vertical.  Full credit to Mozio for putting this together.  Despite some missing companies and those that could straddle across several buckets, this really is a comprehensive one-stop shop of a graphic.

Although I've worked many years in the travel industry in hotels, activities, and OTAs, I'm still amazed by the expansive underlying plumbing in online travel, especially on the B2B side.

I can't wait for more Google photo spheres when shopping for hotels and vacation rentals

I'm loving the high resolution 360 degree photo spheres that Best Western and Radisson are deploying on Google search, hotel finder, and maps.  Although this media still carries a hotelier's slant, the interactive richness gives viewers a much more spatial sense of hotel interiors over static photos.

Since I started working in hotels in 2006, I've always had this dream of taking photos of the interior space and external views of every hotel room in the world, and then organizing them so anyone could search through them to find the perfect room.  Clearly this was just a little itty-bitty dream . . .

A few sites like TripAdvisor or FlyerTalk let users search for and post individual room photos and views.  But finding high resolution photos of individual rooms on these sites is like rummaging through a junkyard for discarded computers with Bitcoins.

Then along came Room 77, a travel meta search site that aimed to create a search and review site aimed solely on individual hotel rooms.  They claimed to showcase the view of each guestroom from hundreds of hotels around the world.  My initial excitement for this site quickly wore off when I saw photo after photo of grainy low resolution approximations calculated using Google Earth.

Room 77's grainy room views, but super helpful floorplans

Just for kicks and giggles, I started my own Blogger site where I would share panoramic room views from the hotel rooms I would stay in.  Definitely not scalable, but just a pet hobby of mine to satisfy a guilty pleasure.

But if there's any company that can pull off my itty-bitty dream of organizing photo spheres of all the world's hotel rooms and panoramics of their views, it's most definitely Google.  And that's why I'm looking forward to more independent and chain hotels following the lead of Best Western's 2,200 North American properties and adding interior photo spheres to Google search.  This would be great for hotels that have unique spaces including wedding venues, fitness centers, and spas.  It would be a first of its kind for hotel shoppers who want the perfect room in that perfect hotel.  But this super rich content could potentially be the defining advantage Google hotel finder has over other travel meta search sites and OTAs to win hotel search volume and CPC spend.

Google and Room77 shouldn't have all the fun though.  HotelTonight is already leading the way in crowd sourcing mobile photos from individual rooms.  And I have no doubt that photo spheres and corresponding floor plans would improve the shopping experience on Airbnb listings above and beyond the positive impact their professional photography program has already made on average nightly rates and conversion . . . especially for larger, upscale, or uniquely designed one-of-a-kind spaces.

Seriously, could you imagine 360 degree tours (and floor plans) of all these ridiculously quirky Top 40 Airbnb picks?!?

Giving credit to the world's first travel blog post, 20 years ago

Travel blogs have been around for a long time now . . . two full decades.  At first it seems like a no brainer that the content in these blogs are a gold mine for travel dreaming or planning.  But in practice, that's not often the case.  I'm on the fence whether I like them or not when it comes to planning travel.

With the exception of asking a few trusted friends, I do pretty much all my destination planning, travel research, and bookings online.  In fact, most of my destination planning is done through online resources, whether they be official destination sites, review sites, or random travel blogs.

When visiting travel blogs though, there's something about them that makes me have a love-hate relationships with them.  When they're good, they're often times phenomenal . . . packed with vivid imagery and seducing descriptions that captivate me enough to open a new tab and start booking flights.  In these cases, the blogger usually possesses a genuine curiosity in the local surroundings and seeks out the unconventional to broadcast back to viewers.

When travel blogs are bad though, they can really be a waste of time.  Regurgitated information and non-descriptive words like "amazing" or "awesome" can render a sensory travel experience incredibly bland.  What's amazing or awesome to one person may not be the case to me.  So I move on to the next blog, and the next, and the next, until finally I stumble upon some more unique, descriptive, and inspiring content.

But for better or worse, I have to pay mad respect to the birth of travel blogging.  Jeff Greenwald holds the title for posting the world's first travel blog back in January 1994.  It took over three hours over dial up Internet to post.  It's called "One Hundred Nanoseconds of Solitude" and you can read it here.

Fast forward to today, twenty years later, and there's no shortage of travel content written by bloggers roaming the planet and sharing every aspect of travel imaginable.  Now if only there was a way to search through all the world's haphazard travel blogs as quickly and accurately as one searches on Google for relevant content!!

One of my fav travel blog posts comes from wanderingearl.com, about how not to get ripped off by taxis.