I'm from London and I've never heard of HouseTrip. Airbnb is what I use and what people normally recommend to each other. 12 months ago there wasn't much awareness about Airbnb when I mentioned it to friends/colleagues but that seems to have changed now
"Meet the man who's getting his ass kicked by Airbnb in Europe"
Your title is pure link-bait. You offer no specifics AT ALL in your article about how HouseTrip is beating Airbnb. In fact the one potential metric for success that you list for both company is money raised. If that is your success metric, then HouseTrip is getting demolished by Airbnb.
Let's try a different publicly available metric of success. Let's look at supply in Europe. Let's compare the offering of 'entire homes' in a few major European markets, this number will only compare like properties and remove Airbnb's shared spaces from the equation. If those had been included, Airbnb's numbers would almost double in each market.
London - HouseTrip - 1784
London - Airbnb - 4329
Berlin - HouseTrip - 717
Berlin - Airbnb - 4155
Paris - HouseTrip - 2991
Paris - Airbnb - 9096
Barcelona - HouseTrip - 2175
Barcelona - Airbnb - 2459
And for fun,
NYC - HouseTrip - 1000
NYC - Airbnb - 10,249
PS - Airbnb has not already raised $220 million, they have raised just under $120 million.
I too am from London, have known Airbnb for a year or so but never heard of HouseTrip before.
I found it interesting the article focused on his attention to detail and large houses as their differentiator as I think OneFineStay is doing that far more successfully than HouseTrip when I look at their listings.
I have one question, (probably a noob question so forgive me) they mention funding from Index Ventures. I'm sure this happens quite a lot but Index has funded HouseTrip and OneFineStay both for series A and B and now HouseTrip in series C. Would they not find issues or difficulties with funding such directly competing companies?
I'm a little confused. If HouseTrip only deals with the rentals of entire homes, as opposed to people being able to rent out spare rooms...and the pricing is competitive...how could this model compete with airbnb on volume?
A quick search of their listings shows that HouseTrip has less than 3000 Paris options compared to Airbnb's 10,000+.
OF course, that doesn't account for quality. When I was looking for Italian rooms on airbnb, there were numerous generic entries by professional bed&breakfast operators...it was something similar to what you see overrunning Craigslist's apartment listing these days.
However, I'm not sure that the number of lower-quality entries is enough to offset airbnb's advantage. After all, what sets airbnb apart from craigslist is the ability to easily filter by recommendation/quality, thanks to the underlying social network.
It's possible that a native startup can beat back an American juggernaut...but when has that happened? I can think of Groupon in China and, well, Facebook and Twitter in China. I know there are such cases in Europe that have slipped my mind...but AFAIK, all of them involved European-to-European transactions (just as China's groupon clones are Chinese-to-Chinese transactions)...I know a lot of Europeans travel but I imagine the market to capture is still America-to-Europe type visitors, and Airbnb will seemingly always have that advantage.
So again the numbers in HouseTrip's niche seems to be this:
Supply: The number of people who can rent out their entire home
Demand: The number of people who can afford to rent out an entire home (and then, the subset of those who would rather just get a more centrally-located hotel room instead).
Why do you assume that America-to-Europe visitors are the market to capture? Europeans have (typically) more vacation time than Americans, and travel around Europe is pretty easy. Tourism within Europe is a very big market. I don't have figures to hand, but I'd think that it is bigger than America-to-Europe visitors.
