In June we went looking for Hawaiʻi hotels on Airbnb and mostly came up empty. With more senior hires coming in to build the hotel business, it reminded us to try again. Search the normal way, and you still get homes. Click the Hotel filter on Oʻahu and 27 hotels in Honolulu appear, among them Prince Waikiki, Hotel LaCroix, Romer House and Aqua Palms, each carrying 15% back in Airbnb credits. The UX for hotels isn’t bad either. Not great, but a real improvement on earlier attempts to squeeze hotels into the vacation rental layout. Neighbor islands are a different story. You get room listings, not an actual hotel page with all the room types and rates in one place.
Behind it is a hotel team built by raiding the company Airbnb is chasing:
- Lou Zameryka, global head of hotel enterprise and connectivity partnerships (January). Career at Booking.com, including regional manager for the Americas.
- Andrea D’Amico, global head of hotels (June). Eighteen years at Booking.com, up to VP and managing director for EMEA.
- Pepijn Rijvers, chief business officer (Sept). Thirteen years at Booking.com, ending as managing director of accommodations.
And we can’t leave out our own local Airbnb hotel person, Karin Jialin Cao Parker (ex-Expedia), who is working hard to build out the hotel inventory in the islands.
From what we hear, bookings are still small and commissions slightly lower than the other OTAs. From our POV, more competition in the OTA space is a good thing; the duopoly could use a challenge.
