Subscribe
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:
London
New York City
Paris
Los Angeles
Rome
Barcelona
Tokyo
Toronto
San Diego
Lisbon
Earlier this week I deleted my Facebook account. If we were friends on the service and you can no longer find me, this is the reason why.
Part of why I did this certainly had to do with privacy. I read Brian Acton’s (WhatsApp cofounder) account in Forbes this week. And I have been following many of the discussions over the past year:
Privacy legislation is perhaps the only thing that could pose an existential threat to a business that’s entirely powered by watching and recording what people do at vast scale. And relying on that scale (and its own dark pattern design) to manipulate consent flows to acquire the private data it needs to profit. -Natasha Lomas
But at the same time, I’m still on and use Instagram and WhatsApp (both Facebook companies), and I use Twitter pretty much every day.
So I am certainly not in a position to be smug about this decision. Hopefully this post does not come across that way.
The simple truth is that I had more or less stopped using the service. I had long ago turned off mobile notifications and so it had become more of a hassle than anything else.
Every now and then I would go on and find notifications and messages that I wasn’t responding to.
So it had finally reached a point where I thought to myself: Why keep my data here (by the way, you can download all of your data from the site) and why check it sporadically if I’m not really deriving any value out of it? Simplify.
I enjoy Instagram because taking photos is one of my primary passions outside of real estate and design. And I enjoy Twitter as a source of news and mostly civil conversation.
I am easy to get ahold of. I don’t need Facebook for that. Any of the social links at the top of this page (if you’re reading this post on the web), will get you there.
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:
London
New York City
Paris
Los Angeles
Rome
Barcelona
Tokyo
Toronto
San Diego
Lisbon
Earlier this week I deleted my Facebook account. If we were friends on the service and you can no longer find me, this is the reason why.
Part of why I did this certainly had to do with privacy. I read Brian Acton’s (WhatsApp cofounder) account in Forbes this week. And I have been following many of the discussions over the past year:
Privacy legislation is perhaps the only thing that could pose an existential threat to a business that’s entirely powered by watching and recording what people do at vast scale. And relying on that scale (and its own dark pattern design) to manipulate consent flows to acquire the private data it needs to profit. -Natasha Lomas
But at the same time, I’m still on and use Instagram and WhatsApp (both Facebook companies), and I use Twitter pretty much every day.
So I am certainly not in a position to be smug about this decision. Hopefully this post does not come across that way.
The simple truth is that I had more or less stopped using the service. I had long ago turned off mobile notifications and so it had become more of a hassle than anything else.
Every now and then I would go on and find notifications and messages that I wasn’t responding to.
So it had finally reached a point where I thought to myself: Why keep my data here (by the way, you can download all of your data from the site) and why check it sporadically if I’m not really deriving any value out of it? Simplify.
I enjoy Instagram because taking photos is one of my primary passions outside of real estate and design. And I enjoy Twitter as a source of news and mostly civil conversation.
I am easy to get ahold of. I don’t need Facebook for that. Any of the social links at the top of this page (if you’re reading this post on the web), will get you there.
The Gehl Institute has just launched (in beta) something called the Public Life Data Protocol. It was developed by the Institute, as well as by Gehl (the practice), the Municipality of Copenhagen, the City of San Francisco, and Seattle’s Department of Transportation.
The goal of the protocol is to improve the way in which we collect, share, and compare public space information. It is about improving public life in public spaces.
To do this, they have proposed a series of metrics that measure everything from “posture within the space” to “objects brought into the space.” They also propose spatial metrics that help to analyze public life in relation to its physical context.
Gehl is a real leader in this space. I commend them on opening up their methodology and working to create “a common language for people data.” Great data will only help us to build more human-centered cities.
To download a full PDF of the protocol, click here.
Photo by Thaddaeus Lim on Unsplash
The Gehl Institute has just launched (in beta) something called the Public Life Data Protocol. It was developed by the Institute, as well as by Gehl (the practice), the Municipality of Copenhagen, the City of San Francisco, and Seattle’s Department of Transportation.
The goal of the protocol is to improve the way in which we collect, share, and compare public space information. It is about improving public life in public spaces.
To do this, they have proposed a series of metrics that measure everything from “posture within the space” to “objects brought into the space.” They also propose spatial metrics that help to analyze public life in relation to its physical context.
Gehl is a real leader in this space. I commend them on opening up their methodology and working to create “a common language for people data.” Great data will only help us to build more human-centered cities.
To download a full PDF of the protocol, click here.
Photo by Thaddaeus Lim on Unsplash
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
