How hard has Airbnb hit hotels?
By Chabeli Herrera, Miami Herald
Is Airbnb a significant threat to the hotel industry? For the past few years, that question has been a hot topic for hospitality associations, city councils, hoteliers and tourism promoters across the globe.
Now industry-watchers are getting a window into Airbnb’s place in the business.
This month data and analytics firm STR, the leading tracker of hotel performance, released the first independent comparison of Airbnb data and hotel industry performance.
In an analysis that compared daily data directly from Airbnb against STR’s own hospitality data over a two-and-a-half-year period, STR confirmed what most suspected: that Airbnb is hitting the industry in its bottom line. But, the study concludes, it is still too early to determine how large that impact may be.