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Airbnb strikes again with its arsenal to conquer the hotel industry. The hospitality service and rental platform signed a partnership with the French software company Availpro, which currently has a portfolio of more than 10,000 boutique hotels in Europe and Asia.
Thanks to this agreement, hotels listed by Availpro will now be available on Airbnb, and both reservations and prices will be synchronized in real-time and automatically between the two platforms.
This newest partnership is the second most important business move for Airbnb in its goal to win the hotel industry war against Booking, Hotels.com, and similar platforms dedicated to reservations and hospitality.
By February, Airbnb had already added 28,000 hotels managed by the distribution and management group SiteMinder, and then undertook an aggressive direct campaign to owners of small and family hotels, inviting them to be a part of its platform.
The establishments that will join Airbnb’s extensive accommodation list are exclusively boutique hotels, ranging from small to medium size.
Several of them already advertised their services on the hospitality platform, but San Francisco’s technology highlights that not all sites listed by the French company will join immediately: only those that meet Airbnb’s quality requirements will be merged to the list.
“The hotels must accept our rules of the game,” said Emmanuel Marill, director of Airbnb in France.
With this agreement, Airbnb adds hotels to its list “that share their same vision of hospitality”. In practical terms, this represents a commitment to offer higher quality accommodations while moving further away from the low-cost tourism model that defined the company in its early stages.
Availpro’s hotel establishments are located in France, Spain, the United Kingdom and Eastern Europe.
The conditions are the same as any other owner that’s already a part of the Airbnb platform: a commission of 3% to 5% to the host, and 5% to 15% to the guest.
As a strategy to win over more independent hoteliers, Airbnb reminds the hotel industry market the advantages of joining their system, which includes payment in advance of reservations, longer stays and cancellations “are extremely rare,” Marill explained.
Source: tourism-review.com
