Woah, this is huge. The travel startup graveyard is full of P2P tours and activities providers, none of which managed to gain much traction - @couchsurfing probably comes closest, but it's far from mainstream. @axk does a good job of explaining why it's so hard in this analysis from @denschaal of @skift: “Margins are incredibly tight (just 10% in some cases)…See more
@gillianim Very true. The travel industry has fallen into a vicious cycle of being forced by aggregators to compete on price. They have a very heavy technical environment to work with just to maintain their network and fleet. Compound that with the lack of traceability with existing tour operators makes it a hard space for incumbents to innovate in. Hopefull…See more
@haichenw@gillianim what I find more interesting is that AirBNB is well suited to run this as a loss leader which could serve to capture significant market share while avoiding (ignoring) the slim margins. They've done this before (free verified photos for listings) to add value to the service
@a_nater@gillianim My question would be do they need to run it as a loss leader? There are hardly any decent competitors in the market, and certainly none with a reputable, trusted Identity system which would facilitate this crowd sourced model.
