How to stay green and growing, and not ripe and rotting
Imagine. Fifteen years ago, there was no alternative accommodation category on Booking.com. Today, there are 7.2m short term rental listings and in its Q3 2023 earnings, this sector grew the fastest, 24% year over year, making it about 33% of all bookings.
As Laura Houldsworth, managing director of Booking.com, Asia Pacific, says in this third episode of WiT Podcast: Customer Love, “It’s a super exciting space for us and we know that it’s surpassing the conventional hotel category.”
And if you want to be part of this “New Wave of Customer Love”, Nuno Guerreiro, Regional Director South APAC and Chains, Booking.com, says you have to choose to be either green and growing, or ripe and rotting.
The answer is a no brainer, so you simply must listen to this episode, focused on the fast-growing alternative accommodation sector, featuring Nuno and his colleague, Inas Abdella, Director of Product, Booking Home.
This episode contains lots of nuggets of insights about the reasons behind the growth, what travellers are looking for as well as what suppliers can do to ride on this new wave of accommodation, and understand what different travellers want.
Says Inas, “Over the past few years, certainly amplified by the pandemic, there’s been an increased demand for flexibility.”
People wanting to feel more local, the rise of work and leisure trips becoming intertwined, travellers looking for home away from home experience, remote work, family travel, multi-generational travel – all these factors converging to lift the tide.
Recognising this, Inas says Booking.com started scaling the bookable length of stay, from 30 to 45 to 90 days “and saw that there was an increase in bookings for these longer lengths of stay”.
“There’s been a massive growth in families traveling together, good representation of those traveling with infants. So we’ve been introducing baby cots throughout the traveller funnel on Booking.com and making it easier for partners to also set up cots to be able to attract more family bookers.”
Two markets to watch in APAC – Australia and India. In Australia, features that are important include beachfront locations, barbeque pits, and “is it countryside, is it remote, so they can really have a local experience. I think what is important today is that they just don’t get cookie cutter experience,” says Nuno.
As for India, which Nuno says is “the new China”, payments is super important. Over 300m Indians have digital wallets so “if you’re not offering digital payments, you’re out of competition”. Vegetarian cuisine is another key feature hosts have to consider.
To make it easier for customers to find the alternative accommodation they want, Booking.com has introduced a Quality Rating for apartments, holiday homes and villas that “indicates varying levels of quality, helping the traveller to be able to better understand what is the level of quality or comfort that they can expect from a certain property, which really helps to better inform that decision making process,” says Inas.
It’s also launched Request To Book, a feature it is continuing to roll out, in response to what it’s seen evolving in the short term rental sector. Says Inas, “At Booking.com, providing travellers with instant confirmations has been a cornerstone of our product offering for quite some time. And it’s something that we’ve seen travellers really enjoy …
“But over time, as the short term rental sector has been evolving, and listening to the feedback of some of our prospective partners, they just simply were not comfortable with an Instant Booking if they wanted more information and more control …”
As for their recommendations of their favourite short term rental places, well, have a listen:
