Airbnb are never far away from the headlines, but the homesharing giants have been outdoing themselves in 2018. Alongside a plethora of announcements made at the end of February, including two new tiers of homes and a long-awaited loyalty scheme (Superguest), Airbnb revealed earlier this year that they’d struck a partnership with hotel distribution platform (and Triptease partner) SiteMinder. The move was met with an understandable flurry of excitement, principally due to the proposed 3-5% commission fee for hotels listing on the site (which are the moment are limited to boutiques and smaller properties).
This puts Airbnb in direct competition with online travel agents – and potentially with a much more attractive offering to hoteliers. Hotels have been allowed to list on the platform for over a year now, but with the SiteMinder partnership Airbnb are really making their long-term vision clear. Hotels using SiteMinder’s channel manager will now be able to push rates to Airbnb just as easily as they would to an OTA. This is about saying: “Look, we’re open to distribution through the kinds of channels that hotels want to use.”
Amidst all the excitement, though, hoteliers would do well to remember the principle of price parity and providing potential guests with a consistent experience across all of the sites they are browsing. With guests already on a site pushing a potentially competitive product (vacation rentals), it’s especially important to ensure that prices on Airbnb are not under- or overpriced compared to your other rates, therefore providing an extra incentive to book elsewhere.
Let’s walk through an example scenario.
An exercise in Airbnb commissions and parity
It’s important when thinking about different levels of commission to start with what the guest is paying. As always, you want to ensure price parity across all your online distribution channels. Of course, you may want to offer a cheaper price direct, but you certainly don’t want to be giving guests a better price elsewhere.
