shawbridge

Airbnb seems to be offering a $25 referral credit. Just book a stay and saw that.

stackm

I'm sure business at Airbnb is doing well but they do seem to be stingy with any kind of promotions that really benefit the consumer.

The referral credit is nice, but if they really want to compete with hotels, why not a loyalty program? Something like hotels.com (buy 10, get 1), or a discount or reduced fees for VIP users. Give hosts extra perks as well.

And a strong Airbnb credit card may go a long way to increasing visibility in the P&M blog world.

sbm12

Directories/archives are built in to Wordpress. Everyone has them. Ditto for searching. It is just a matter of if you as a reader actually search or not.

kokonutz

While those things may at some point happen, right now there is enough market differentiation between the Airbnb/VRBO model and the hotel model that the value proposition of the former makes loyalty incentivization unnecessary. And little enough competition in the private flat short-term rental space to also make loyalty it bit moot.

Not EVERY travel product has (or has to have) points or miles involved. (Although I may be impeached from the FT Talkboard for implying such heresy here). @:-)

Understood. But the days of 'expert' reviews are mostly over. Most folks today prefer the open-source review process, meaning the way to figure out if a place meets ones' individual standards is to read a variety of reviews about it. And Googling around to different blog entries is not an efficient way to do that. Flyertalk, TA, provider comments, etc. are.

sbm12

Maybe, maybe not. I prefer to trust others who travel in the same style I do for their views on hotels rather than the morass of TripAdvisor or even FlyerTalk. And if I get a collection of 50 or 100 people who all travel and who each have their own sort of style but who also are all in an aggregated location then using that to filter through hotel reviews might not be such a bad thing. If 10 of those people all stayed at the same property and the luxe guys hated it but the budget guys loved it that means something, right?

kokonutz

Oh definitely! The hardest part of evaluating open source reviews is evaluating the reviewer. And that's why I typically start at FT rather than TA...at least that reduces the chances that I will be reading a review by someone whose idea of a great hotel is that they have vibra-beds.

TA tries to address this with their user profiles. But ultimately fails.

I don't think Boarding Area gets it done the way you are implying, though. It's not open source. If I relied on that, I'd only be able to read about one resort in all of the Maldives, for example. And that resort is a complete fail for me because it requires a long boat ride that would not sit well with my wife.

I've yet to find a turnkey solution for evaluating hotels and rental flats. It's very time-consuming and never totally fool proof process.

84fiero

That's true, style and preference make a difference, a big one sometimes. And where finding a travel blogger or two whose style mostly matches your own can be quite worthwhile.

Yeah with TA it's pretty hard to really discern anything about the reviewer despite their profile attempts. Posters with a lengthy review history may give you a clue about their tastes but that's about it. I tend to just look at the overall ratings, trends, and any recurring good or bad points about a property. Like, if most of the past 15 reviews mentioned arriving to find sheets on the bed hadn't been washed, that's probably an issue. One person whining about a mis-aligned light switch cover...not so much.

Having some good traveler pics helps a lot. Although not foolproof either, at least then I can kind of see for myself. Certainly better than back in the day when all you had was a couple of airbrushed photos on a printed brochure.

kokonutz

My approach with TA is always start with the 3 and 4 star reviews because that's where the truth tends to be. I generally ignore the 1 star and 5 star reviews (unless there are a large number of 1 stars reviews). For the same reason I try hard to avoid giving 1 or 5 star reviews: they generally are the least thoughtful or helpful.

sbm12

Open source (by which I'm sure you mean anyone can contribute) doesn't solve the problem, though. Just because anyone can offer an opinion doesn't mean it will be the one(s) you want.

And I'm not suggesting that BA has solved the problem at all, but I also do not believe that it is nearly as bad an approach as has been suggested here. And the influx of new writers might actually be useful in this particular area, especially if they get the search and indexing working the way I believe it is expected to happen.

And while the breadth of reviews remains low today (and it will always trail a massive, open site) that isn't necessarily bad. Having a good source to start with, whether blogs, FlyerTalk or elsewhere, means you can see if your "trusted advisers" have experience at the site. Should that fail you expand to broader options. You seem to think FT is the best for you in that regard. But that doesn't mean the blogs are a bad choice, especially if as a consumer I've found a couple bloggers who travel in the same style I like to. In many ways I'd trust that sort of review more than a random member here who I don't know and whose style of travel I'm not familiar with. Plus the blogs make it a helluva lot easier to add photos.

84fiero

If BA does indeed get some improvements in that regard it would start to make it a lot more useful to have larger quantities of bloggers. I'm guessing that would be beneficial to the newer bloggers on the site, who aren't popping to the front/top as much as the established blogs.

Kagehitokiri

Directories/archives - only by date is built in to wordpress, BUT not everyone uses wordpress

Directories/archives - http://www.featherfactor.com/travel - this is done manually, few do it

while tags are more common than above, not everyone uses tags, and tags is not searching

the only luxe source is flyertalk luxury hotels forum

kokonutz

I don't think blogs are a BAD approach. And I do use them when planning travel. As noted above, I used them to eliminate the possibility of staying at the Grand Hyatt Maldives, for example.

FT is really only marginally better than TA in terms of having to wade through a lot of niggles to get to the heart of the hotel's quality and service...but at least FTers tend to have experiences with suites and club levels.

Where P&M blogs and FT both fail massively is that they mostly only review places obtainable or upgradable with status, points or whatnot. Rarely do they review luxury travel experiences that are cash-only. Like AirBnB or VRBO (which is how I got on this kick in this thread @:-) ).

Agree. And makes that forum a bit out of place here.

Hm.

oliver2002

Well, the thing I like in the megathreads about a property is that I can browse different opinions and read the challenges other members give someone who posts a review. On a blog I don't trust the comments because critique may have been censored, and on TA there is no critique possible. At least the last time I checked.

Doctor of Credit

There are a lot of misconceptions in this thread. Firstly AirBnB offers both a referral for individuals and affiliate commission to publishers, which is extremely competitive when compared to CC sign ups.

I'd think that the main reason it's not posted about more is that the experience isn't easily replicated. AirBnB doesn't do any quality control, I could stay at an amazing place or I could stay at a complete dump. I can recommend a hotel that has several hundred rooms or I could recommend a place that has occupancy for a few hundred people per year. It's not surprising that the big bloggers don't post about it often when looked at in that light.

If I stay at a Hilton I know there is a minimum service level that I'll receive. I personally love AirBnB and stay at properties all of the time using their service. I think they serve a completely different market than a hotel though (at least for me).

I stay at hotels when I am traveling for work or plan to stay somewhere for a short amount of time (1-2 nights) and I stay at AirBnB places when I have longer and traveling for pleasure.

Also AirBnB's reservation system sucks big time. I don't want to send messages back and forth for twenty minutes only to find out the place isn't available for the dates I want. They really need to crack down on people not keeping their calendars up to date.

stackm

Deal Mommy has coined "Vendoming" after reading one too many reviews. So maybe this little backlash will encourage bloggers to check out some undiscovered properties.

http://first2board.com/thedealmommy/...ming-momentum/