If Airbnb has a penalty of any kind for property owners to list on competitor websites, then it will be very difficult for competitors to enter the market.
Antitrust law is intended to do this. The general algorithm is:
- Company engages in unlawful anticompetitive behavior to drive competitors out-of-business
- A few years later, the FTC starts an investigation
- Competitors go out-of-business
- A few years later, the FTC possibly delivers a slap-on-the-wrist or possibly nothing at all
Microsoft played this game for many years in the eighties and nineties before there were any more serious consequences. They eventually came, but on the whole, Microsoft won big-time on anticompetitive behavior.
And of course, it's only what the FTC can find out about, and their jurisdiction doesn't extend into China, so Apple gets away with a lot of shit that they wouldn't otherwise.
The problem is that if you list on 2 websites at the same time, then these websites cannot guarantee availability anymore, unless there is some protocol to communicate this.
E.g. what if someone books an apartment on website 1, and another person books the same apartment on website 2 at the same time.
Usually hosters that do this are "professional" and have multiple listings or ways to mitigate it. One is tools that auto-update multiple platforms to keep them in-sync, leaving only small "timing" windows where there could be a double booking. Another is to simply phone the renter and offer another place (if they have multiples right next to eachother which is often the case), or give some sort of discount, etc.
Essentially, it's a "solved" problem at this point and is on the level of being a commodity.
This is a somewhat solved problem by hotel reservation platforms. Responsibility to notify the platform about availability changes are on the property owners. They pay some fines or (some other form of cost) if they have to cancel a reservation due to clashes.
Of course this is a solved problem. Even cheap booking systems manage and synchronise a whole bunch of different booking platforms. Tourism is a multi trillion dollar industry.
2. They have competitors that are larger than them, Booking.com
Booking.com is in every way better than AirBnB for guests and for honest hosts. This means that with time, AirBnB is going to get more and more scams, becoming the market for lemons.
Booking.com does sometimes seem not to do a proper integration and just rely on emails or phone calls to confirm the bookings. I've used them multiple times around 10 years ago and the hotel would show me a printout of an email from them with my booking details afair.
A friend of mine recently had to sleep in the car because booking never confirmed her reservation with the hotel and wouldn't accept her booking.com confirmation printout.
That depends entirely on the hotel. They can use one of the many booking systems that integrate with booking.com through XML or they can choose not to. If they choose not to, then they will have to manually sync availability and receive their bookings by e-mail. A nightmare, but their own fault for not running their business properly.
> A friend of mine recently had to sleep in the car because booking never confirmed her reservation with the hotel and wouldn't accept her booking.com confirmation printout.
If the hotel has any booking system on their own website, there is a good chance that it integrates with booking.com and others. If they ask guests to book by phone or email, then they probably do not have any integration.
I don't have first-hand experience, but I own a couple of short-term rentals, and the word on the street in the hosts community is that booking.com (BDC) is full of scammers and not worth the effort to integrate with.
This makes me wonder where you get your word from? Booking is well established since a very long time, if a host is problematic you'll see it in the reviews. If they're scams they get removed from booking. For clients there is no way for them to scam a host.
