Hotels are not obsolete, AirBnB is 'disrupting' the industry by ignoring local laws and regulations. It may be that these regulations exist to protect an obsolete business model but it also might not.
When your path is blocked by a fence before you tear it down, its a good idea to understand why it was put up in the first place.
I actually still use a travel agent for nicer vacation bookings. I almost always pay the same price as on the website, but get upgrades, free breakfast, spa credits, etc. etc.
When it's more than the website, I do a cost-benefit analysis and decide whether the value I'll derive from paying a slightly higher price for amenities is worth it or not.
And, I get the benefit of the travel agent's expertise, as you say, who knows a little bit about me and what I care about. Sure I can do the research myself (and I will often do so), but it's nice to get all this stuff for basically nothing.
(2) only because they are members of larger organizations that can strong arm prices down.
(1) I'd rather the aggregate recommendations of a million people than the personal opinion of just one in most of these situations - you want the statistical mean experience, because a travel agent can be given special treatment or just have had a lucky streak placing clients in an otherwise seedy place.
(3) Hopefully another thing tech can fix. I mean, yeah, you have the rare extremely special case circumstance you can't easily break down into a power search, so they have a niche, but as a general tool for people looking for places to stay, you really don't need another fleshy body directly involved with the seeker.
(2) Yay! The client wins! :) On a more serious note: That is how internet companies continue to stay in business: automate, lower prices, increase competition, etc. Agents just beat them at their game.
(1) How many online reviews are fake? How many are written out of spite? There is a level of trust you have to give someone: either an online reviewer or a person.
(3) Having a human to work with is usually better service than not. But it really depends on the situation.
Edit: I'd like to mention that I am not an agent of any sort. I do more business online than anyone I know, but I also realize the pros/cons of both sides of the spectrum.
> (1) How many online reviews are fake? How many are written out of spite? There is a level of trust you have to give someone: either an online reviewer or a person.
That is why I quantify pretty explicitly a million - I'd never consider any sampling below, say, a hundred reviews, and even then you have to accept the inherent inertial bias that anyone content with their experience won't review it, and disproportionately people will complain about a negative one than praise a great stay. You need enough aggregate results to smother false reviews or non-systemic bias.
> (3) Having a human to work with is usually better service than not. But it really depends on the situation.
It is really situational, but one critical aspect of the information age is a litmus test on every human service position on whether or not actually having gassy meat on one end of the transaction is really worth the comparatively huge costs of keeping said meat bag alive and happy. And it is a personal test - which is why most industries that have been displaced by the Internet still exist to serve the population that values that interaction.
I worked in hospitality for 5 years, and right now I'm staying at a hotel in downtown Vegas, a few miles from the author's Airbnb place. Hotels are obsolete. It's not the business model, short-term housing and hospitality certainly have no risk of obsolescence ever, it's the industry.
Service sucks, rooms suck, tech really sucks. You have awkward kids in bad suits and clip-on ties at the front desk who're trained to use Romantic terminology over Germanic. That's at the better places.
I'm staying at the original, and seemingly one of the better, Fremont Street places, in town for a quarterly meetup for the startup I'm at. The wifi costs $12.99 a day, they throttled my connection the one time I used it trying to make a viddy call, and last night I was connected to the router but nothing was coming through. I've had similar experiences around the country, for the past 10 years, and seen little improvement. I convinced the hospitality company I was at, and some that I consulted with, that the wifi is as important as the running water, but you can tell most don't feel that way.
I got in the other night around 10pm, went to a touchscreen terminal they overpaid for, and I haven't seen a single person use over this week here, but didn't have a confirmation because someone at the company booked it, so used a phone sitting next to the kiosk to call a representative, who directed me around to find a desk that I'd passed and disregarded because it was labeled as "Tickets", then spent a good half-hour getting checked-in because of various confusion and technical glitches and dozens and dozens of key-presses in their property management system.
Then, there are the guests. As soon as someone stays at a hotel, they think they're entitled to act like an asshole. It seems to usually boil down to them feeling like they overpaid, regretting the decision, and taking it out on some staff member. They know that the people around them are either other customers or employees, and treat them with ambivalence because there are no consequences or accountability. Guests can review a hotel, hotels can't review guests.
A couple weeks ago, I stayed at an Airbnb place for the first time, outside of Boston. We texted the host when we were coming, took the T, ending up on an awesome light-rail car at the end that I didn't know about, walked through a beautiful neighborhood, knocked on the door, chatted with the host for a minute, and were shown to our room. Totally painless, which made it easy to feel gracious and respectful of the host and his property and neighbors. Had a great breakfast at a local place, because good places are in residential areas. All you can find around hotels are crappy chains. You know, because of the zoning. And that good places don't want to deal with pissed off hotel guests.
I love hotels (specifically, Starwood and Inter-Continental, especially in Asia), and spend about 50-100 nights/year in hotels.
I infrequently use VRBO to rent a house somewhere without great hotels (and have tried AirBnB but outside SF, never worked out really well), but otherwise, the hotel experience is basically awesome for me. There is one set of tweaks I'd like to do (maybe to make a brand-within-a-brand for Westin or something), where guests get a standard network config in any room once they sign in, with MFC device in-room, VoIP phone, their own wifi settings, etc.), but otherwise it's awesome.
Being able to basically trust an international 5-star hotel to have a certain level of physical security and functionality (or to be able to add it) even in a place like Myanmar or Pakistan is great.
Being able to show up at 0200 and reliably know there will be people to check me in, that my stuff won't get stolen, that I can leave luggage and equipment, that a meeting with ~16 people won't be a problem with short notice, that the building meets basic fire safety, ...
The crappy hotels like Motel 6 or Super 8, sure, suck, but I avoid those.
Yep. I haven't done much with AirBnB and its ilk but I do often try to go the B&B route rather than the-big-chain-hotel (or even the smaller not-so-chain-hotel) route. But, as you say, especially for business travel, a lot of the time I just want something predictable that meets a certain standard. I don't want to be concerned that if my plans change and I don't get in until 9 that there won't be anyone there to let me in, etc. I frankly just don't have the mental energy to deal with on-offs for the whole 1/3 of the year or so I travel.
If the only thing that is causing you grief is the check-in check-out process, it is worth noting that some owners do try to streamline this process as much as possible. I for one try to keep contact with the person down to a minimum. Because you guys are right, I don't want to talk to anyone after 12 hours of travel.
A combination of aggressive use of hotel points (eg I paid for 7 nights in Bali just now, about 100-150/night for huge suites with my girlfriend, and am doing 14 days in Bangkok starting 5 nov for free on the points I earned (due to promos, etc).) and work reimbursement. I'm also sort of homeless in that I don't pay rent. (Gf has condo).
A lot is work reimbursed (looks like about 200 nights in 2014 if things go well), plus Starwood points from work and personal Amex.
A quick list of gripes is a pretty unconvincing argument that hotels are "doomed". There is no guarantee that any of those things would be better at an AirBnB. Likewise, a corresponding list of gripes could be assembled for AirBnB-like services. Neither type of service seems "doomed", although the AirBnB-type stuff is probably on shakier ground at the moment, merely due to the legal gray areas.
The big thing for me, is predictability. If I book in at a chain hotel in particular, especially a chain I've stayed at before, I have a certain expectation that the standard is roughly en par, and that the level of hassles will be similar. If I book via AirBnB, I have no idea if the next host will be anything like the previous, and have to put in effort checking reviews. It's hassle I might take if I'm going to spend lots of time planning a long vacation. Not something I want to deal with for short stays or business trips.
I used to "commute" to the Bay Area every 6-8 weeks for a couple of years. I'd stay a week each time. A hotel offered me a certain expected standard of service, which might not be great, but it was there. It offered me regular cleaning. It meant I had a reasonable expectation of a room of the standard expected of the hotel whenever I came over, as the number of rooms available meant I did not have to deal with people who had a single room or a handful of units available that'd regularly book up.
After a handful of trips, I had my list of 3 preferred hotels in the area, and knew I'd generally get one of the types of rooms I liked best every time I came over.
And every now and again I made use of room service or laundry services, and those few instances were themselves often worth it. But most of the time I spent a total of perhaps 10 minutes dealing with hotel staff over the course of a 1 week stay.
For a lot of people, hotels offers a certain set of expectations that might very well not include "great service" to be worthwhile. Not having the risk of suddenly dealing with some owner flaking on me would alone make picking a hotel worth it. When arriving after 16 hours of travel (11 hour flight + annoying time on both ends), I wanted to be able to walk up to the desk at the hotel, present them my details, including my bonus card, and know I'd be in the room and relaxing five minutes later, with no hassle.
"Walking through a beautiful neighbourhood" or chatting with a host would be far down the list of things going through my head at that time. In fact, my boss at the time lived nearby, in a beautiful, expensive house in Palo Alto, and I did stay with him once and it was nice as a social thing. But the hotels, while far less personal have what for many travellers is an advantage of being extremely predictable.
So no, hotels are not doomed at all. Some hotels might lose some types of customers. Likely the type of customers that are fickle and leave money in local breakfast places rather than in their restaurants, care about the cost of extras because they pay for it out of their own pocket, and otherwise generally contribute less to their profits anyway.
1. Corporate business and negotiated rates (a large % of business)
2. Groups (unless you cram 20 - 40 people in an airbnb room?) - this includes conferences, conventions, aircrew, functions, tour groups) (another large % of the business)
This assumes we're talking about city hotels with a normal(ish) business mix, but individual travellers often don't make up the largest portion of business for the hotel (this really does vary, but outside of pure tourist and transit areas it's roughly accurate). Add into the mix the zoning and health & safety requirements, and I'm not sure you could call "doomed" just yet.
There is scope for (ahem) disruption in booking and distribution, which we already see - but the physical product is probably going to be around for some time. Sometimes, you just need a big building with lots of rooms...
Airbnb is for people with more time than money.
Hotels are for people with more money than time (they do not want to spend time chatting to arraange a booking, or to set up social proof for themselves on yet another social network just so that people will consider them).
My one Airbnb experience was massively negative because I value my time.
Hotels are not remotely doomed. Demand for them may go down, though.
"Then, there are the guests. As soon as someone stays at a hotel, they think they're entitled to act like an asshole."
You know, you may have a tremendously challenging job, are jet-lagged and still have to give 100%. Then you pay 400 Euro for a hotel and they charge you another 30 or 40 Euros per day for Wifi. You get annoyed but you don't care because you will get reimbursed. Wifi will be unreliable and you can only connect four devices at a time. And while this did not bother me, it bothered some of my colleagues that were travelling with an extended family (I mean, Computer, Phone and eReader may eat up already 3 out of 4).
And then you have the fancy shower. I tried for five minutes to get it to work. Manged to get water for a few seconds twice. Finally, while having a PhD in engineering, called the front desk to send somebody to show me how the shower works. No, it was not me. "plumbing problems, please wait 15 minutes". And another 15 minutes, and another 15 minutes. Finally it was time to go to bed without a shower.
So, yes, hotel guest can be annoying and can be "picky". But if I pay 400 Euros for a night then a working shower with preferably warm water and a reliable internet connection can be expected.
Hotels are not obsolete, AirBnB is 'disrupting' the industry by ignoring local laws and regulations. It may be that these regulations exist to protect an obsolete business model but it also might not.
When your path is blocked by a fence before you tear it down, its a good idea to understand why it was put up in the first place.