Airbnb beats actual posh hotel chain with stupidly large valuation

Groupon was worth all that money when it floated as well. Some suckers are going to get burned here.

Stop it now. This is silly.

While Marriott have a lot of assets - lots of real estate in prime locations and millions of unstealable coat hangers - what does Airbnb have? As far as I can tell, a load of listings of properties owned by people who could easily up sticks tomorrow and list on Bnbly, Bnbr, Bnbify or whatever the next copycat will be called. Oh, and a questionable new logo.

Airbnb's website claims they have 1.2m listings worldwide. Let's be generous and assume those are all real listings for places that a sane person would actually want to stay in - and pay money to do so. That $24bn valuation works out at a nice round $20,000 per listing.

Marriott, by contrast, is worth about $22bn and has 4,000 hotels, putting them at just over $5m each. But then, Marriott could sell them all tomorrow for a nice bit of cash. What's a listing on Airbnb really worth? In cents, I mean.

I haven't had a coffee today so please tell me I'm missing something obvious.

Marriott mostly runs hotels that other people own, not quite the same as owning them!

How many bed rooms in No. 10 and Buckingham Palace? Could pitch a few tents in the grounds of the palace of Westminster. Lets see how committed they really are.

> civil servants ... to use sharing economy solutions to book accommodation and transport

And of course as part of the Leadership-with-a-capital-L that we hear so much of, the Cabinet & assorted senior wonkers will be leading this initiative from the front? Or is it yet another do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do endeavour, seemingly designed to eradicate any remaining goodwill among the rank & file?

Remember, Remember

Does anyone else find this eerily familiar?

Amazon, with their rented servers and a warehouse full of mouldering second hand books get a market valuation bigger than Disney.

AOL (remeber them?) get a market valuation that allows them to buy into Time Warner.

15 year olds getting feted by VCs and offered millions because they have a .com.

And through it all, people who point out the lunacy of all this get told by 'older and wiser heads' "Ah, but you can't see the big picture. We're all gonna be rich!"

Right up to the moment when the bubble bursts and the naysayers get rewarded for their insight by losing their jobs.

Been there, done that. And of course, when the much anticipated profit (which would rightly have gone to the VCs cos of the risk they took) doesn't turn up, those same older and wiser heads smile sadly and say "Well, awfully sorry, but your superannuation seems to have evaporated. Never mind, at least I didn't have to sell any of my helicopters because I had YOUR money to cover it"

Ri se and Repeat. Forever.

AirBnB are at least already making money (as in, users are paying directly), and have a business model based on selling something tangible. You can't say as much for Twitter.

In fact, AirBnB take money off the letter and the renter, so there's quite a lot of money to be made.

That said, as pointed out above, even though I'm a fairly contented occasional user, there's nothing at all keeping me from jumping ship to a new/better/different service. So I'd say they're overvalued, unless they've got something cunning up their sleeves.

How much?!

I work for an online travel agency - a pretty big one, most of you would know who we are - and we have revenues of around $1bn. I.e. a bit more than Airbnb.

We got bought a couple of years ago. And let me tell you, it was for nothing like $24bn.

But then, we are not as trendy. And you know, we actually make loads of money. Investors don't like that it seems.

Let me get this right: from projected 14-15 revenue of £565m, with an operating loss of £94m, Air BnB expects to go on to turn around $10bn (say, £6bn) in 2020 – in just five years – making a profit of £1.9bn? From what? It’s like expecting windmills alone to make enough energy to keep the lights on: you’d have to puncture every inch of the country with them if you wanted that to work. By the same token, everyone in the world would have to become a bed and breakfast host if the company were to make that sort of money. An Observer Tech Monthly wet dream, no doubt, but this is, in the end, just a commission agency: ultimately, a parasite – and if the host decides it’s had enough, bye-bye business.

Mind you, If I owed 100 million+ to the Russian gentlemen backing AirBnB, I too would be anxious to flog the lot for 15bn before any, ahem, sudden and convulsive corrections in the markets, tech or otherwise, pulled the plug.