Airbnb Has Car Rentals Now. What Does That Make It?

On Monday’s Good Morning Hospitality, A Skift Podcast, Brandreth Canaley, Michael Goldin, and Jamie Lane get into three stories about where the STR industry is headed now that the World Cup is behind us.The conversation opens with Airbnb‘s partnership with CarTrawler for car rentals in five countries, the latest step in Airbnb’s quiet transformation into a traditional OTA. It already has homes, hotels, experiences, services, and airport pickups. The crew digs into what that means for hosts who built their business around a platform that was supposed to be different.

They also run through the final World Cup numbers for STR operators: rate gains were real across host markets but occupancy told a different story, and hosts who priced too high too early paid for it. They close with the Freddy Effect and what a German tourist who fell in love with Waffle House, Inc. House and Buc-ee’s, Ltd.‘s teaches operators about authentic guest experiences and word of mouth that actually moves markets.

This episode is presented by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠StayFi⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bilt⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

If you’re leaving direct bookings on the table, StayFi turns your wifi into a guest relationship engine. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://stayfi.com/goodmorninghospitality/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠to learn more about their special offer of 50% off for GMH listeners!

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Watch This Episode

Well, first, welcome back, Jamie. We have missed you this month.

You’ve been globetrotting, running around the country. So great to have you back.

Excited to be back. Last week of my sabbatical, month July off, joining you guys here from my cabin up in North Georgia, getting some work done. I do have the kids with me.

School doesn’t start till next week. So if anyone jumps in.

We know that these kids are starting school the first week of August. I just cannot wrap my mind around that.

They got out in May. So that’s true.

That’s true. I do want to give a, oh, sorry, go ahead.

Jamie, you’re a month early on the, it’s August that you’re supposed to take off. That’s what I heard.

That’s Europe. You just brought up the Europeans.

Yeah.

US takes July off. Just make sure no work gets done during the summer.

Correct.

Everybody’s just out of office emails back and forth, back and forth. But I want to give a quick shout out. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, sometimes when I’m at my house in the Adirondacks, my grandma joins us.

So shout out to my grandma B who’s sitting off to my right over here. She’s a big fan of the podcast. So she’s excited to be, she’s our live audience today.

Grandma B. Yeah. I also want to give a shout out to Michael for throwing a really incredible retreat last week.

We were down in Sarasota with 30 industry leaders just having really incredible conversations, a great time, perhaps over-served on occasion.

Speak for yourself.

That is speaking for myself.

Well, yeah, it was a blast. I appreciate your help in getting some key folks there as well. Really, really good time to just sit and dive into the space, and so much is moving and so much is changing so rapidly.

Whether it’s techs, tech or roll-ups, AI, those were all, I think, probably the three hottest topics of the weekend, but it was really a week. We just call it the weekend because it felt like one.

I know, it was kind of jarring when you’re like, oh, tomorrow’s Wednesday and I’m going home. Yeah, weird.

I’m so tired.

I’m so tired. Yeah. But yeah, it’s great to get people from different corners of the industry, certainly people I haven’t met before, which is also great.

And then it’s also funny when you’re like, have I met you or have I just seen you on LinkedIn? So it’s great to put real faces and actual conversations behind names that you see all the time. Yeah.

And awesome for many of them commenting favorably on the show too.

So hello everybody. Thank you for tuning in.

Awesome. Well, before we jump in, we have a couple of really exciting stories today, but we want to give a shout out to our sponsors at StayFi.

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5:13

Sonder Brand Lives

So we have like big fun news today. It was-

Breaking news.

Yeah. Embargo lifted moments ago. Michael, you’re the one who brought the story, so take it away.

Yeah.

So the Sonder brand lives on and it didn’t take long. A lot of times after these bankruptcies, things get tied up for a while.

Sonder’s epic meltdown was I think in November last year, and a company called Travel AI has just purchased the domain in branding behind Sonder. If you don’t know Travel AI, they bought Kasai a year or two ago when Kasai went belly up.

They like to buy very seasoned branded URLs and then turn them into, grab B2B supply and turn it into an OTA.

I had no clue the scale of how many sites they actually ran, but Sean O’Neill reported this morning that they have 530 consumer sites and they clear $750 million of gross bookings a year.

So there are giants in the industry that aren’t front and center, that aren’t putting their brand first and just power almost $1 billion of travel a year. So congrats to you guys.

The Sonder brand was excellent and we know they dumped millions and millions and probably tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into the branding and URL trying to get it to work and get direct bookings. And now you get to draft off of that.

So if you have any more details on it and want to share with us, site traffic or purchase price for, very curious, those two numbers.

Yeah, I was, this reminded me of kind of when there was the first round of collapse of the big VC funded companies and when at Romi, we bought a bunch of Domeo’s IP and Domeo for whatever their faults had really spectacular branding.

And I remember we bought, yeah, some of their IP, but one of those things was an app that they definitely spent at least a million dollars on.

Like there’s a group of people at Domeo that worked really, really hard on it and we bought it and then did nothing with it because it wasn’t useful to us at that time.

And it just made me think like people at these companies are working so hard on something and then it just kind of disappears into the ether. And then someone might pick it up and they might do something with it. They might not.

It’s really, you spend a lot of your time and your energy building things at companies and then sometimes it just goes away. Or sometimes it now directs traffic to this huge organization.

So I mean, at least a little bit of their legacy continues to live on.

Yeah. And you go to the site and it is, and with all of Travel AI, they sort of lean into a niche of that site. So whether it’s, and stays for pets, stays on lakes and whatever it is.

And with Sonder, they’re leaning in heavily into urban stays in the major cities. So what Sonder was known for. So whether it’s major US cities, European cities, and then you go on and it’s inventory from Booking, Expedia, Verbo.

So definitely taking that playbook, leveraging the traffic. I think it’s nice to see that Sonder is going to be a net and revenue positive site, first time in a while probably.

And yeah, it’s interesting to see another one of the brands that’s been part of the industry and leveraged again for just the traffic that they’re able to generate.

So maybe, and is this ultimately just the graveyard of past BC-sundered companies in our space?

A great business model, really, if you buy them for the right price. So.

Yeah, I mean, think about all the work and all the money that Sonder put in to building the reputation of that site. And now they’re like, cool. Like 50, I think they said 50 domains, 70 domains, 50 global trademark registrations.

So again, a lot of money and a lot of effort were put into those, and now they belong to Travel AI.

And Sonder’s sales and marketing budget for 2024 as reported, and we know their reports were not always right, but $84 million spent on sales and marketing just in 2024. So grow that over the past decade when they were in business.

And they spent a lot of money on this site. So good purchase, love to see it continuing on. And Travel AI is the giant that not many people pay too much attention to.

But I guarantee you the Expedia’s and the Booking.com’s love them.

Definitely.

10:15

Airbnb CarTrawler Partnership

Well, speaking of other OTAs, our next story is about Airbnb. We teased this previously about them getting into rental cars, but they are partnering with CarTrawler for car rentals in five countries.

So that’s the United States, France, Italy, Spain, and Australia. So if you’re a customer in any of those markets, you can now book airport pickups and other services, including cars. So that’s fun.

I thought this was exciting to see who was powering it.

Since at the product release, it was sort of, we have rental cars, but they didn’t talk at all about who was powering behind it. So, awesome job, Dennis, sort of getting the scoop on who was actually providing it.

And CarTrawler is like the, probably number one B2B provider of car rentals. So not a surprise. But I think the real scoop here is that they’re under contract to be acquired by Expedia.

So now it’s going to be essentially Expedia powering car rentals at Airbnb.

And how long, I suspect it’s like, and they’ll keep it going for a while, but maybe the clock is now ticking on how quickly can Airbnb either build these own integrations to all the different brands themselves, or find a different partner if they

It’s all part of Expedia’s B2B domination, just even power other OTAs.

And we saw this with Hopper, Expedia powered so much of Hopper. And then one day they just decided, enough, and it nearly bankrupted Hopper. And then they got sold off for parts to Citi.

I think it was Citi or Chase, one or the other. But yeah, power moved by Expedia, interesting move by Airbnb. I mean, just another step to becoming an OTA.

We talked about it a little bit before the show. I would venture to guess the vast majority of short-term rentals booked at least in America are drive to destinations for individuals or families.

And so I don’t know how much an integration with car rentals is going to move the needle in a big way. But it’s just one more signal that they know they have to become a full-fledged OTA than just a short-term rental platform.

Yeah. And CarTrawler, I was doing some research, they essentially power all the car rentals on the airline sites.

So, and to the extent that people were already bundling car rentals with their travel, and Airbnb dominates the cities, they dominate urban travel.

And so a lot of people are, and they’re using their Uber to go, but in the past month, I’ve been on the road in Iceland and Maine, like I was staying in short-term rentals and we rented a car.

There’s some countries that are just in even parts of the US. You’re going to drive out to Glacier and stay in, in short-term rentals, you got to have a car. If you’re driving up to Maine and staying in short-term rentals, you got to have a car.

Like you’re not using Uber and there’s so many destinations. Like, yeah, if we’re going to a conference, like I’m going to Uber or I’m going to stay in a major city. And it makes sense.

But even if you’re flying down Destin, like you got to have a car in that market and Uber is not going to be or Lyft is not going to be the primary mode of transportation if you’re traveling with your family.

Yeah, one of the interesting things to me about this, even though we say that they power a lot of the other airline car rentals and things like that, I feel like for a public company like Airbnb, I mean, I guess the airlines are public, but it’s not

direct competitor, it would be a huge red flag that the person controlling a part of your service supply is another major public OTA. Like that just surprises me that that kind of like, I don’t know, incestuous behavior is allowed. I don’t know.

Well, it’s a great way to trial it without having to put a ton of money towards it.

True, but is there another group that like, there must be other ways, you know what I mean? Maybe not, maybe not.

I mean, Turo seems like it fits the Airbnb brand the best, but yeah.

And one, the transaction isn’t done yet. So Expedia has announced that they’re acquiring them, that it’s not a done deal yet. So it still has to go through review.

They’re not under the sort of umbrella yet, but it is expected to close in the second half of the year. And then that’s going to be something for them to figure out.

All right, well, before we hop in to our final World Cup data analysis, we want to give a shout out to our…

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16:45

World Cup Data Analysis

So Jamie, your return from sabbatical came at a very opportune time for us to discuss the real aftermath that we’ve been talking about for months now about the World Cup and what actually happened.

Was this the huge boon that everybody thought it was going to be?

Yeah. One, did you guys watch the game?

Yes.

A good chunk of it. Good chunk of it. I thought it was pretty exciting, second half.

Excited to see Spain eke it out at the end. They were clearly the better team.

Zero shots on goal from Argentina in the first 90 minutes is pretty crazy.

It would have felt like Spain got robbed if Argentina sort of eked it out at the end in a shootout or something like that. I’m so excited that Spain won. Congratulations to them.

And you’re basically a Spanish company too.

So you got some happy team members over there.

We are a Denver and New York based company with a large office in Spain. But yes, there are a lot of happy AirDNA employees. Our CEO is a big Argentina fan.

So it was really wild to me the unsports like how unprofessional and just straight up rude that team.

I mean, it’s I it’s really I mean, unders I know that that’s like maybe the reputation. But man, you guys, they all make so much money. And it’s just like, you could love to see it turning out back, scrap away people.

I love to see it.

I was just like, you are.

It’s just so ridiculous. I don’t know.

Yeah. So so I think this might be the last time we have to talk about data related to the World Cup. I think we’ve done it what?

10, 15 different episodes over the past. Not when you weren’t on. But now we’re getting the wrap up stories.

Some New York Times did a great wrap up story. Skift, Bailey did a great wrap up story, both quoting a lot of AirDNA data that the team pulled while I was out. But let’s start with hotels.

So it did end up being a big boom for hotel revenue, especially in New York around the final. So in the lead up to it, and hotel revenue was up 21%, hotels in New Jersey saw revenues increase by more than $40 million.

What was interesting with short term rentals was we actually saw demand in the lead up and during the final actually down slightly in New York. There’s just almost no short term Airbnb Virbo properties available in the city anymore given local I-18.

But we saw demand in the early games up 24% New Jersey and for the final up 37%. So it really was a boon for New Jersey short term rentals. Like there was a big increase in supply up almost 30% and then subsequent increase in demand.

So that was awesome. But what I thought was really fun in the New York Times articles is they sort of went through all the different ways the World Cup sort of drove and changes in traffic. So Times Square was packed without the towners up 7%.

I’m 305,000 pedestrians walking through Times Square. And you saw-

Terrifying. Avoid, avoid.

Avoid. You saw bars and restaurants sort of packed with watch parties and all sort of supporting their different teams. On-premise beer sales up 14%, which is incredible.

You even saw a city bike had its biggest month ever. So you think about riding a bike around New York City in June and July, maybe not the best, but I know it was happening.

And then my favorite Tinder said they had a flood of out of town users, up 35% in New York around the Brazil, Mexico or Morocco game. So definitely expanding the dating pool around the games.

Temporarily.

Brandy, can you confirm or deny?

I plead the fifth.

Your grandmother is sitting.

Sorry, forgot B.

Yeah. I can only speak to Boston data, so, you know.

Okay. Well, Jan Freytag in the Skift write up, had a good quote that I think kind of hammers it all home for us.

The idea that we were going to have 104 Super Bowl ads, all packed into one continuous demand story for four or five weeks, it’s wildly optimistic.

I think if you look at the data from the US versus past ones in Qatar or Russia, the amount of locals going to the games or even just the sizes of the cities that the games are being played in are exponentially larger.

So to expect a wild boom and compare it to past ones is not a fair assessment, just like the Olympics probably won’t be for LA. When is that? This summer?

Next summer? 2028. Two summers from now?

These are great events for the local economies. I’m curious what the F&B, I mean, you mentioned beer sales was through the roof. Thank you, Scotland.

Appreciate that. But I’m curious the impact it had on local businesses, people going to restaurants to watch games instead of the actual game. I suspect it was still a really, really strong economic turnout.

Yeah, for sure.

Then you also think about the, there’s a couple of things.

First, FIFA is definitely the, I think, the source of pumping a lot of the expectations because it’s part of the deal when they’re going in to say, hey, you need to spend all this money on infrastructure and whatever, like you’re going to make it

back in this way, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it did seem there was just like this naive optimism in the beginning of like, there was going to be basically the equivalent of a Super Bowl or Taylor Swift concert like every single day.

And yeah, there’s a little bit of a reality check there. But then there was the comment that there was a huge listing growth in some of these cities. And it’s like, yeah, if Kansas City is not accustomed to hosting events like this.

So obviously, people are going to throw their stuff on Airbnb or Verbo or whatever, mostly Airbnb realistically.

And then in cities that have like New York or LA that have the hotel capacity, you’re probably not going to see as much either local regulations or because it already exists there. Right.

So I think some of the numbers always have to be taken with a grain of salt.

Yeah. And Paul Manzi brings up a good point of just like the counterfactual, like how much better could it have been if like one brand USA had funding the past two years?

If the reputation that the US had towards being welcoming, you’re like, we remember…

We only needed Freddie. We only needed Freddie.

And Freddie, I do think will pay dividends for some time of like all the everyone willing to come and experience Waffle House and Buc-ee’s. And I think he did a great job.

Yeah, Costco promoting the South, going to football games, even going to MLS and see the long-term impact of international travelers coming to the states.

But you can’t get around the fact, the negative publicity of like, hey, you’re going to get your phone checked on what your social media posts are.

Even if that didn’t come to fruition, it definitely ran through the news cycles across the European countries and just caused maybe a lot of people to think twice on whether they wanted to come or not.

Yeah. Well, I’m sorry. Go ahead, Michael.

25:55

Freddie American Travel

I was going to move on to Freddie and the man we all needed.

Yeah. So if you don’t know who Freddie is, you’re living under a rock.

But also no one actually knows who Freddie is, except this German guy that came over with a couple of his buddies and was authentically documenting and like truthfully in awe of various parts of America.

He started in Tennessee or North Carolina and then worked his way through Georgia, stopped in my town of Auburn and went to the messy game, Argentina versus Iceland, the last warm up, made his way to New Orleans.

By then, he was like gaining steam and he went from 4,000 followers to 400,000 followers.

Can you imagine how dramatic that is for him? All of a sudden, one day you’re like, wow, so many people are listening to me basically.

And the New Orleans Saints invite him into their practice facility and show him around. And then JJ. Watt puts him up in a five-star hotel in Houston.

And all this time, he was saying no to brand deals, no to private flights. One of the casinos tried to send him a jet to go visit him. And he’s like, no thanks, I’m going to drive from Texas to Oklahoma.

That’s all I want to do. And he, I don’t, LO. Langley, I guess, is the musician that he fell in love with and went to one of her concerts.

And anyway, he just highlighted, one, an entire segment of America that Europeans don’t visit. They go to New York, they go to Chicago, LA, Miami, and DC. And that’s it.

You’re not one of those cities, then you’re not going there.

And a couple of weeks ago, or maybe even lastly, Brandy and I talked about Barcelona limiting travelers is probably a good thing for everyone else, except for Barcelona, because then the travel goes to the Spanish versions of Chattanooga and New

Orleans and Atlanta, right? You see a whole different segment of the country. And in many ways, a more authentic and real part of how people live. And the sentiment also of Americans view on Germany increased by 13 points because of Freddie.

So his impact is not just felt in America, but felt in Germany. And these are the real stories that I wish news would just cover, because to Jamie’s point, they’re out there telling you, you’re going to go to jail if you try and come in the country.

It’s just not true, and it’s just all fear-mongering, and it’s all politics, and Freddie’s the man that we all needed and we didn’t know.

Yeah, I like that he didn’t take brand deals. He didn’t get correct. That’s, the thing is, I feel like if he was an American influencer, they’d have been like, absolutely, get me on that jet to the wind.

So it’s nice to see that he was sticking to, he was like, because I also think about it, like when else are they gonna have an opportunity to just drive like that?

Like I’m gonna drive for 18 hours, it’s gonna be absolutely flat, and I’m still gonna be, I’m gonna be one state over. Like it’s just, it’s an expanse that like, is really hard to grasp.

I even think like for Americans, if you haven’t been to that part of the country, like how vast it is, is pretty impressive.

And just like, I saw one of his latest threads on just, I’m traveling on a budget of like walking through like, how much it actually spent on like, and it wasn’t a whole lot. Like you’re driving, he was staying in budget hotels primarily.

Like, and it wasn’t a major expense to go and spend and a month plus traveling around the US and made it look very accessible. You don’t have to be going to the win and partying at XS or whatever the clubs are.

And you can go to Buc-ee’s, you can go to an MLS game, you can go to some of these things that I’m really, I mean, it’s what the average American is doing every day. And it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to really see the country. Yeah.

And really what pulled out with him was how authentic it was.

And it was like, you know, very Germanic as well. Just matter of fact of this is crazy. The European minds cannot comprehend this.

Yeah.

I thought that the air conditioning quote, because that really killed me.

When they were in, he’s like, it’s so hot outside. And he goes, I’m freezing. It’s just like this entire stadium is air conditioned.

Don’t think about the environmental impact.

Well, yes.

So I think this will hopefully cause not just Brand USA, but other nations to look at their ad budget and tour budget and not send it all to New York City that likes travelers, but they don’t like short terminals, or to Barcelona that doesn’t want

you there. So just, I don’t know if you can actually replicate it, except for the fact of quietly promoting the actual people, doing the actual traveling, telling the real stories.

Yeah, exactly.

31:32

Weekly Plans Farewell

Well, that is a wrap on today’s episode. What do you guys have coming up this week? Michael, same old, same old.

Well, today’s my birthday.

So, surprise, the kids are super excited. They’re at the most fun age where they think the world of dad and wake up and are just so excited that it’s your birthday. So-

Did you get breakfast in bed?

No, I got up to have coffee before the kids got up.

That’s more important. Well, happy birthday.

Maybe they’re not at the age yet where you can get an actually well-cooked meal in bed.

Yeah, without spilling coffee, walking down the stairs and all that egg shell in the eggs. But yeah, we might pop down to Dauphin Island sometime this week, we can catch a window.

But other than that, one of the last weeks of summer, school starts for us next week as well. The end of next week.

Are you excited about that?

Yes, yes. I now understand why parents loved school, going back and just hating it. Jamie?

Yeah, so this is my last week off.

I’m back to work next week. So as I said, I’ve got the kids up at the cabin today. We’re just dropping some stuff off, installing a puzzle table and we’re lacking a good spot to do puzzles, which was sorely needed up here.

But we’re going to go gold mining as soon as we get done with that, and then go do pirate mini golf. Then I’ve got a long list of things that my wife has come up with me to do this last week before I go back to work. So it is a last week off of work.

Beautiful.

Are you going to Dahlonega? Are you just going to get a pan?

We’re going to go to a gold mining spot in Helen, some near Dahlonega, but not all the way in.

That’ll be fun. It will be.

Maybe you’ll find enough gold and you can retire.

Billions of gold was pulled out of North Georgia.

We have tried to pan the creek that is on the property. We have found nothing so far, but we’re still hopeful.

Keep trying.

Yeah.

Amazing. Well, yeah, I’m off to New Jersey for a meeting today, and then I’ll be back up here because I have a pretty huge family reunion this weekend, around 300 of my extended family, and I am helping cook food for all those people.

So it’s my cousin Ted and I.

She’s got Andres over here.

Yeah. It’s really going to be crazy. I was looking at the RSVP ticket ticker, and I was like, oh my God, so many people.

We have a band and some DJs, and it’ll be fun. It’s going to be what it is. It’s going to happen.

So wish me luck.

Do you know half of them?

Yeah, I do. I would say there’s definitely a younger generation right now that’s in their teens, and maybe early 20s where I’m like, oh, I got to like really double down on that.

And then usually like people, sometimes people have like weeks during the year that they come up that I’m not here. But because this is a 175th anniversary, so it’s like a big deal. So a lot of people are making the point to come this weekend.

So there’s just some people I might not have seen in a decade. So a lot of how are you and who are you going on? So yeah, it’ll be fun.

We’re trying to get a family picture. If I can corral all these people into one location.

So awesome.

Yeah. Well, thanks to everyone, especially Paul, as always. And B, our live in studio member for tuning in.

And thank you all for listening. We will see you next week.