Modern MBA: Airbnb is losing its competitive edge to hotels

While Airbnb continues to outperform the hotel industry in terms of scale and listings, the challenge the tech company faces today is the realization that quantity is not quality.  Safety issues, service inconsistency, guest volatility, intrusive hosts, privacy concerns and excessive policies have resulted in Airbnb travelers feeling more like burdens than guests to their hosts these days.  On the flipside, regulation has also caught up.  With mandatory city fees, licensing and permit costs now factored into each booking, Airbnb can no longer use the tagline that they're cheaper or more unique than a hotel when they're already being taxed like one.  And since affordability was a major driving force behind the company's early popularity, it's an open question mark as to how Airbnb will navigate these choppy waters ahead.  When the playing ground becomes level and price becomes equal across hotels and Airbnbs, service will inevitably become a competitive advantage.  The reliability, predictability and consistency in guest experience is really where hotels have continued to edge out Airbnb across business and leisure travel for the past several decades and why the industry as a whole doesn't think of Airbnb as a threat.

~ Modern MBA, "Why Airbnb Fails to Disrupt the Hotel Industry," 24:30 mark, YouTube, April 9, 2022

Jeffrey Tucker on global Covid travel restrictions

The emergence of global travel in the 20th century – its universal availability and practice – was one of the great triumphs of liberalism and modernity. 

We rejected the isolation, parochialism, and local stagnation of the past and sought out knowledge and adventures all over the globe.  We encountered new people, new places, new experiences.  The world became open to all, thanks to commercialized flight.  This also generated an incredible positive externality for public health.  More exposure to the world improved immune systems for individuals the world over – a point first made to me by Professor [Sunetra] Gupta. 

Then in an instant it was closed.  International tourist arrivals are down by 85% from 2019.  A third of the world’s borders are shut.  There seems to be no movement in the direction of reversing this disaster and reinstituting the wonderful world of 2019. In fact, there seems to be very little awareness that this has happened to us much less of the terrible consequences.

~ Jeffrey Tucker, "These Travel Restrictions Must End," Brownstone Institute," September 15, 2021

Glenn Fogel on vaccine passports

We need to start rebuilding international travel. And if there’s something like a technological way to show that you are safe to travel, then I am in favor of that.  We really need international travel to come back and the only way that's going to happen is if we have more people vaccinated and governments feel it is safe to travel.

~ Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking Holdings, parent company of Booking.com, Kayak and Priceline, "Vaccine passports will revive international travel: Booking Holdings CEO," Yahoo Finance, April 7, 2021

Travel + Leisure on the remote workplace in travel destinations

Nayara Tented Camp in northwestern Costa Rica is joining idyllic locations around the world - Barbados, Bermuda, and Aruba, to name a few - in rolling out the welcome mat for digital nomads. 

~ Travel + Leisure, "You Can Work From a Dreamy Luxury Tent With a Private Pool in the Costa Rican Rain Forest," March 17, 2021

Mark Twain on travel

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.  Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

~ Mark Twain

Dave McCann on exploring new cultures

I've found that my interest in material things has been almost entirely replaced by my interest in exploring new cultures and making new friends. I have experienced the hospitality of cultures vastly different from my own and forged friendships in almost every corner of the globe.

Spending several months in a sleepy little town with no fast food shops, no night clubs, no Wal-Mart, no sports teams, no TV and not much of anything familiar from our culture could be torture for some people. But being in such a place makes you special in the eyes of the local people. I usually find that they are just as curious about me and American people as I am about them and their customs. It's kind of fun being the object of an entire village's curiosity.

When I show up in such a place, there are often people who have never seen a foreigner. Children are especially curious and sometimes I feel like the Pied Piper with a flock of children following me around. Sharing a meal with a family in a small farming or fishing village, comparing customs and traditions, and laughing with each other as we stumble through the language barriers; these are the moments I enjoy most.

I enjoy spending a day with one of the locals while he does his normal daily activities, like joining a fisherman as he nets fish from his rowboat on the Nile River. I've seen a farmer irrigate his crops using two buckets suspended from a pole across his shoulders and plow his rice paddy with a wooden plow pulled by a pair of water buffalo. I've watched a printer set up his hand-and-foot-operated printing press to print business cards in Arabic.

I have had time to really get to know some people who live a hard but simple life with little or no income and little hope of that ever changing. People adapt. If you cannot afford a car or a TV or a refrigerator or shoes; if you live in a house with a dirt floor and a thatched roof and no running water; if you have to work stooped over in the fields from dawn until dusk from the time you are a child until you are old and feeble; it builds character and teaches you how to relish things that are simple and free, like compassion and humor. I have learned a lot from these people, and I am a better person because of it.

~ Dave McCann, ME '79 from University of Missouri-Rolla, senior field engineer for GE Energy Services, Missouri S&T Magazine, Summer 2009

Aldous Huxley on travel

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

~ Aldous Huxley

MSN City Guides: America’s 10 best outdoor towns

In choosing the “101 Best Outdoor Towns: Unspoiled Places to Visit, Live & Play” (The Countryman Press, 2007), authors Sarah Tuff and Greg Melville researched access to national and state parks, major bodies of water, hiking and mountain biking trails, and ski and snowboard terrain; population; affordability; and such downtown resources as gear shops, brewpubs and coffee houses.

~ MSN City Guides, "America’s 10 Best Outdoor Towns," December 3, 2007