Airbnb's IPO documents recently went public.

Not surprisingly, their business as a travel company has been heavily impacted by COVID-19. Last year, the platform saw 326.9 million nights and experiences booked, with 251.1 million being booked in the first nine months of 2019. This year, nights and experiences are down to 146.9 million for this same nine month period. Revenue is correspondingly down from $3.7 billion for the first nine months of 2019, to $2.5 billion for the first nine months of this year.

But what is also clear from their data is that people still really want to travel and have new experiences. As soon as April passed and the Northern Hemisphere entered the normally busy Q3 travel season, domestic travel began to quickly ramp back up. For many, this likely took the place of international travel. See above chart.

Of greater concern might be all of the regulation that now surrounds short-term rentals. As of October 2019, about 70% of the platform's top 200 cities (by revenue) had some form of regulation impacting short-term rentals. But at the same time, no one city accounts for more than 2.5% of the platform's revenue. So there's strong geographic diversification.

If you'd like to take a look at the company's S-1, you can do that over here. And for those of you who might be curious, these are Airbnb's top 10 cities based on revenue:

1. London

2. New York City

3. Paris

4. Los Angeles

5. Rome

6. Barcelona

7. Tokyo

8. Toronto

9. San Diego

10. Lisbon

Who needs to travel when you have, this? This, is a site called Drive & Listen, which allows you to drive around cities -- well, watch vides of people driving around cities -- while listening to local radio stations. It's oddly fascinating in an I-spend-hours-on-Google-street-view kind of way. (It's okay if you do that too.) A colleague sent out the link this morning and I thought it was a pretty clever idea, particularly right now, when many/most of us are yearning to travel, but can't. The first cities I visited were Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Lisbon, Berlin, and, of course, Toronto.

Photo by Sasha • Stories on Unsplash

I just subscribed to Kirsten Dirksen's YouTube channel. She makes videos about simple living, self-sufficiency, and small homes, among other things. She has nearly 1.3 million subscribers and her videos have almost 500 million views. I think many of you will really enjoy her channel.

The above video is about an apartment in Lapa, Lisbon that was renovated by architect João Gameiro. Originally constructed in 1819, the top floor space had been pretty badly neglected. João renovated it by striking, what seems to me like, the right balance between old and new.

Some of the other homes featured on her channel include a laneway house in Toronto, a tiny floating home in Berlin, and an off the grid cabin in Joshua Tree.