Airbnb is trying to become the one-stop app by allowing you to book restaurants now. The popular booking site has grown to become one of the most popular booking sites for vacation spots. The company does not own any of the properties listed but acts as a broker receiving a percentage of the booking from both the guest and the host.
Airbnb has teamed up with the restaurant reservation app Resy to bring the new "restaurants" feature. You can now book restaurants last minute or in advanced and search for them by a specific cuisine, price range, and location. Currently, this feature is only allowed in a select few major cities across the U.S.
The company is looking to go along with their booking and experiences features by adding restaurant reservations. This should help for the company to gain ground on other booking sites such as Priceline, which owns the popular restaurant booking app OpenTable. Airbnb is currently valued to be around $31 billion but is continuing to grow by adding features. As well as they may be doing, it will be hard to overtake and become the majority market shareholder in travel booking when compared to the megacompany Priceline Group. Priceline is currently valued at around $87 billion.
The good news for Airbnb is that they are a young company with a lot of upside. CNBC ranked them the number one company on their top 50 disruptor companies of 2017 and for good reason. While the restaurants feature is brand new, the company is also expected to expand into flight booking in the near future.
It is amazing to see how fast the company has grown since being founded in 2008. Their quick growth came with some corner cutting and risk though. The site has been in trouble ranging from racial discrimination by the booking host, tax avoidance, and crimes committed by both guest and host.
As far as my personal experience goes with Airnbnb, it was subpar, to say the least. I had never used the company up until this past July. I booked with a host in Miami two months in advanced and had communication with the host. We showed up at the condo and she wouldn't answer my calls or emails. Long story short, we ended up getting a full refund plus 10% of what the booking price of the condo was to book another Airbnb. We did not want to wait around for another host to confirm our booking, so we ended up getting a hotel.
I have heard nothing but good things from other people who have used the service and the customer service was pretty good, but my personal experience has left a sour taste in my mouth about the company. I booked my condo for the Georgia Florida game using VRBO, but I have never used them before either. Hopefully I don't have the same issues as I did with Airbnb.
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