Airbnb Seeks to Enter Luxury Market
Airbnb has plans to launch a new service targeting the luxury market, a new report suggests.
According to sources cited in Bloomberg, Airbnb wants to offer a new rental service featuring high-end mansions and penthouses—one full notch above Select, Airbnb’s upper-midrange tier, for which hosts are expected to maintain a certain standard of quality.
Quoth Bloomberg:
It’s known internally as “Airbnb Lux,” but an official name has yet to be determined. A luxury tier of rentals represents a lucrative revenue source for Airbnb. The company takes a percentage of the cost of each booking it brokers, so more-expensive inventory would generate higher margins and help justify the privately held company’s $31 billion valuation.
Lux would follow Airbnb’s acquisition of Luxury Retreats, a Canadian-based company renting out vacation homes, earlier this year. It would also build Airbnb’s roster of customers interested in its concierge-like, experience-based tourism services it rolled out last year.
