Great breakdown by Casey Winters on the strategies - https://news.greylock.com/four-strategies-to-win-big-with-lo... - showing that there are different strategies, and not one absolute best.
"Brand is an extension of the Airbnb model, not its own strategy. If the product doesn’t deliver on a differentiated experience, brand building usually does not create loyalty."
This post seems to say that AirBNB didn't just focus on brand, but they innovated on /somehow/ making booking UX "10x" (let's leave the ostensible 10 aside for a moment and just say "a lot" instead) better than incumbents. But that requires a durable product advantage, one that consistently creates a differentiated experience. It's more accurate to say that brand is a downstream side effect of the core product than a sole or primary focus.
At one point in the past I heard Booking was the largest spender, worldwide, on Adwords.
I wouldn't immediately consider the hotel metasearch products a problem for booking. It shifts traffic to different paid channels with different tradeoffs (eg. less fine grained control of spend if it's a revshare model). I ran the product development in marketing for a little while. Some years ago (ie. late in the game, largely due to politics), we started investing in cross channel attribution models to better direct spending.
Disclosure: I no longer work for Booking, though. I do work for Google, but am in NO way involved in Ads or travel and an not trying to comment on the company's business.
Seems like Booking and Expedia disagree with you:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/some-of-the-biggest-tech-n...
Time flies!
So they are definitely getting a tremendous amount of organic traffic because "Airbnb" became a verb like Google or Uber.
Especially around the fast growing millennial sector which is very focused around experiences and travel.
Definitely helps that Airbnb has become a verb - can't beat that.
> Most of our guests discover Airbnb organically, with approximately 91% of all traffic to Airbnb coming through direct or unpaid channels during the nine months ended September 30, 2020.
Anyone know what % of traffic to Bookings and Expedia (and others) are paid vs unpaid? 91% unpaid seems really high, and I wonder if it's because Airbnb is so differentiated / people want to "Airbnb" a place (vs. "stay somewhere")
edit:
> Our hosts had 7.4 million available listings of homes and experiences as of September 30, 2020, of which 5.6 million were active listings. We consider a listing of a home or an experience to be an “active listing” if it is viewable on Airbnb and has been previously booked at least once on Airbnb
IMO it's super sneaky to blend homes and experiences together