Post by High Priestess on Jul 17, 2016 3:11:36 GMT
See the article:
hbr.org/2016/07/airbnb-is-facing-an-existential-expansion-problem
The Airbnb commercial goes like this: “Don’t go to Paris, don’t tour Paris, and please don’t do Paris.” But then the punchline: “Live in Paris….”
But how many travelers can “live there” before Airbnb accepts that it has become a vehicle for mass tourism, and that its users are tourists?
What is the endgame for cities where Airbnb continues to expand? Some cities say they don’t want to be “the next Venice,” turning into a theme park for tourists, with locals pushed out. It’s not an unreasonable concern. Reykjavik is a small city, with a population of only 120,000 people and a flood of tourists. The city’s only apartment rental website listed just nine apartments for rent in downtown Reykjavik. There were 22 in the entire city….In Reykjavik there are roughly 50,000 apartments; 2,551 of them, or 5 percent, are Airbnb units.”
Even smaller communities are experiencing problems of scale when it comes to Airbnb. Joshua Tree is a small town of 7,000 people on the edge of the Joshua Tree National Park in California. It has over 200 available Airbnb rentals. Resident Christine Pfranger observes that “locals are having difficulty finding homes to rent, and are being pushed out of their homes to make way for more vacation rentals.” Another resident adds, “Airbnb and vacation rentals are changing our community….House prices are going up because people now buy houses to rent out as vacation rentals, making it close to impossible for people working in the area to buy a house.”
hbr.org/2016/07/airbnb-is-facing-an-existential-expansion-problem
The Airbnb commercial goes like this: “Don’t go to Paris, don’t tour Paris, and please don’t do Paris.” But then the punchline: “Live in Paris….”
But how many travelers can “live there” before Airbnb accepts that it has become a vehicle for mass tourism, and that its users are tourists?
What is the endgame for cities where Airbnb continues to expand? Some cities say they don’t want to be “the next Venice,” turning into a theme park for tourists, with locals pushed out. It’s not an unreasonable concern. Reykjavik is a small city, with a population of only 120,000 people and a flood of tourists. The city’s only apartment rental website listed just nine apartments for rent in downtown Reykjavik. There were 22 in the entire city….In Reykjavik there are roughly 50,000 apartments; 2,551 of them, or 5 percent, are Airbnb units.”
Even smaller communities are experiencing problems of scale when it comes to Airbnb. Joshua Tree is a small town of 7,000 people on the edge of the Joshua Tree National Park in California. It has over 200 available Airbnb rentals. Resident Christine Pfranger observes that “locals are having difficulty finding homes to rent, and are being pushed out of their homes to make way for more vacation rentals.” Another resident adds, “Airbnb and vacation rentals are changing our community….House prices are going up because people now buy houses to rent out as vacation rentals, making it close to impossible for people working in the area to buy a house.”
