Airbnb, Booking.com: Save money by comparing prices for same listings

By
Mr.Whiskey

• Home-rental service Airbnb is
  now directly competing with travel booking sites like Booking.com,
  Expedia,
  and others, as all of the sites have both traditional hotel
  listings and non-traditional apartment and home listings on
  their platforms.
• As the companies’ strategies for growth converge, I’ve
  observed that more and more rental listings can be found on
  multiple sites, often with wildly divergent pricing due to
  different fee structures and pricing algorithms.
• Save yourself a ton of money on your next vacation by
  cross-referencing listings that you want to book across
  multiple sites. I often found discrepancies of $100 or more per
  night by checking listings between Airbnb, Booking.com,
  Expedia, and others.

Earlier this year, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky
made clear what has been apparent to hosts and power-users of
the popular home-rental service for some time: The company
isn’t the only game in town anymore.

“Our competition is two companies — Expedia and
Booking.com,” Chesky
told travel news site Phocuswire in February. “Make no
mistake: We are going to run this company for decades, but in a
certain way.”

To put it simply, travel booking sites like Booking.com are in a
race to become more like Airbnb, while Airbnb is making a run to
be more like those sites.

Booking.com announced in April that is
now has 5 million non-hotel properties on its platform,
including houses and apartments, a 27% jump from 2017. When you
include hotels and traditional listings, Booking.com says it has
27 million listings total.

Meanwhile, an Airbnb source
told travel news site Skift that the company has up to 4.85
million listings, up from 4.5 million in 2017 and with plans
to grow to 5 million in the near future. That follows the
company’s announcement in February that
it was adding hotels to the platform.

What does that mean for the end user? 

As the two services converge in their offerings, more and more
listings can be found on both Airbnb and Booking.com. And, from
my experience, identical listings often have wildly different
pricings depending on the platform.

There are likely multiple reasons for the price discrepancies.

The sites charge different commission fees to hosts/hotels/etc on
the platform, as well as different fee structures to the guest
booking.

In addition, Airbnb has a “Smart Pricing” feature that hosts can
use to automatically
raise or lower prices based on demand. Meanwhile, Booking.com
has its RateIntelligence feature, which helps
properties optimize their pricing. Each platform’s tool
obviously uses its own algorithm, which likely results in some of
the price discrepancies.

Check pricing for identical listings across platforms and save
money

Long story short, when you find a property that you’d like to
rent on one platform, do yourself a favor and find the property
on competing platforms. It’s likely that the price will be
considerably cheaper on one platform or the other.

In my experience, I’ve found that Airbnb tends to be the most
expensive platform for the end-user, because it adds on a
cleaning fee, a service fee, and occupancy taxes after the fact,
where Booking.com usually includes it in the price.

This is pure speculation, but I believe this has to do with user
expectations. Airbnb users are conditioned to view Airbnb as a
peer-to-peer service, rather than a straightforward consumer
site. As such, they are more willing to accept a cleaning fee
after the fact, viewing that as a cost he or she should bear,
rather than the host. Meanwhile, Booking.com users are expecting
a hotel booking site, where everything is already included.

For example, this apartment in Jerusalem, Israel, listed as

Royal Market Palace Apartments on Booking.com, goes for $317
for six people from September 3 to September 5. Meanwhile, a
seemingly identical apartment
on Airbnb goes for $385 over the same period. A nearby
two-bedroom apartment for five people at Windows of Jerusalem
goes for
$404 on Airbnb and
$386 on Booking.com.

Which is cheaper depends on the property, the location, and the
dates. For example, this Bairro Alto 3-bedroom apartment in
Lisbon, Portugal
is listed for $402 on Airbnb for September 8 to September 10,
while it goes for as much
$731 on Booking.com.

Screenshot/Airbnb

Booking.com/Screenshot

One interesting wrinkle, I noticed: Airbnb often does not charge
you for using the full occupancy of an apartment, whereas
Booking.com almost always charges based on how many people will
be in the property. So if you are traveling with more people,
you’ll probably save money by using Airbnb.

I’m sure you could do this with thousands of listings in just
about any city in which both platforms operate, as well on other
platforms like HomeAway, VRBO, or Expedia. Increasingly, property
owners/hotel operators/small business owners/hosts (whatever you
want to call them) are listing on multiple sites.

Booking.com, Airbnb, and other travel sites are competing not
just for guests, but business owners

Andrey Solovev/Shutterstock

The Airbnb source told Skift that 3.5 million of its listings, or
72%, are exclusive to Airbnb. But I’m not buying that number
until I see the company announce it officially. My suspicion is
that, even if the number of exclusive listings is that high, that
number is going to go down over time.

It simply doesn’t make sense for business owners — Airbnb calls
them hosts, but let’s be honest, they increasingly resemble small
businesses — to list their property on one marketplace,
particularly as competition gets more fierce with the addition of
boutique hotels and bed & breakfasts to Airbnb’s platform.

While Airbnb currently
leads Booking.com in web traffic in the US, Booking.com has
the lead globally, according to SimilarWeb report released in
June.

“We don’t go out asking property owners to give us
exclusives,” Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel told
Skift in April. “We believe in the power of our
demand platform to be able to deliver for hoteliers, property
owners, anyone. Put it on our site and we’ll give you demand.
Some companies go around asking for exclusivity. I wonder why
they would do that if they were able to deliver on bringing
robust demand to partners.”

Meanwhile, Airbnb has said it is focusing on a “community model
as opposed to Booking’s commodity model.”

Whether that will continue to bear out as competition intensifies
is anyone’s guess. In the mean time, take advantage of the
competition by checking prices across platforms.