Airbnb’s strength today and in a post-covid travel world is in it’s flexibility to offering a different kind of travel.

“Airbnb’s “gross daily rate” was pretty flat at the end of last year, hovering around $110. This, too, declined in April. But by June, it had increased to $146, and has since settled to a rate around 20% higher than last year — $128 in September.”

Airbnb in 2020 would be one of the least affected-by-Covid companies on the planet.

“One of my favorite taglines in recent memory was Airbnb’s “Live There,” a campaign it launched in 2017 with the agency TBWA. It’s as cheesy as any earnest brand campaign. But it feels true. A real representation of the Airbnb spirit, something its frequent customers can appreciate. Airbnb-ing isn’t remotely the same as staying in a lame chain hotel in a tourist quarter.”

And he shares an interesting story about why Airbnb probably isn’t the best and biggest travel content creator today:

“In late 2012, Airbnb launched a product called “Neighborhoods”,” he wrote, “which offered users incredibly rich and unique content about individual neighborhoods around the world. Visitors loved it. Almost too much. It turned out the content was so interesting that it distracted visitors from actually booking. When the team removed it from the home page, bookings went up.”

From Dan Frommer’s New Consumer newsletter