Airbnb Is Becoming a Real OTA

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Sarah Kopit reports live from Airbnb’s Summer Release event in San Francisco as Brian Chesky unveils Airbnb’s expansion into hotels, car rentals, services, and experiences.

Sarah and Seth Borko break down why Airbnb increasingly looks like a full-service OTA, what Expedia’s latest acquisition says about the future of travel commerce, and how AI, creators, and social shopping are reshaping travel discovery. Skift’s Adriana Lee and Dennis Schaal were at Expedia Explore in Las Vegas on the same day.

Airbnb’s announcement marked a clear strategic shift from one-off platonic ideals to scale: the company is now selling rental cars, partnering with Instacart for grocery delivery, expanding into headline experiences like the Eiffel Tower and Tower of London, and significantly broadening its hotels push beyond the boutique inventory it first introduced pre-pandemic.

The product reveal was notably AI-light, with Brian Chesky leaning on people-centric design and modest AI enhancements rather than chasing the chatbot trend — a stance that increasingly puts Airbnb in direct competition with Expedia and Booking Holdings across hotels, short-term rentals, experiences, and now cars, with only flights and cruise left on the OTA bingo card.

The car rental move landed alongside Expedia’s confirmation of a roughly $350 million acquisition of CarTrawler, a deal Dennis Schaal had scooped weeks earlier, signaling that car rental — a roughly $6 billion gross bookings ancillary for Booking Holdings — has become the industry’s next contested category. The hosts framed the convergence as inevitable: there is only so much green space left in travel, and even a company built on differentiation eventually has to play where the money is.

In Kopit and Borko’s winners and losers segment, Google took the win for its agentic hotel booking announcement at I/O while OpenAI was tagged the loser for stepping back from that race ahead of its IPO filing. Sarah’s personal winner was San Francisco’s Proper Hotel for its design choices — down to the black toilet seats — even as the conversation closed on a broader observation that luxury travel itself is evolving, with guests now expecting both Aesop-grade amenities and authentic local experiences in the same trip.

Watch This Episode

Hello, everybody, welcome to The Skift Travel Podcast, and the number of the week is two.

That would be two big major blue trip travel conferences or events, I suppose, they’re not conferences, they’re events held by some of our nearest and dearest companies are happening today on the exact same day.

So I’m at one of them, I’m at Airbnb summer release event here in, I’m in San Francisco right now, I’m actually sitting in Airbnb’s offices, and then Adriana and Dennis are at Expedia Explore in Las Vegas.

So we all kind of, we’re all flying around, swapping things, moving beats, doing different things, but it’s all happening and it’s all happening today, Seth, right now, right at the same time. And I just got done listening to Brian Chesky talk.

How was he? Tell me about him. He was great.

You know, he’s actually a really good, I’ve seen him do this a few times.

I’ve been to this event a few times. And he’s a fun guy to talk to. He has a bit of a infectious energy about him.

So, you know, he was excited, everybody was excited. And you know, we’re here, like, at their headquarters, which I’ve never been here before, is absolutely, is a stunning building. But, you know, all the Airbnb employees are here too.

And so it’s kind of like they’re showing us their house, you know, they’re all very proud of it. So it’s kind of fun.

They’re hosting you, you might say.

Yes.

Ha, ha, ha.

Look what you did there.

Yeah, they are exactly right.

It does feel like quite a lot of conferences because the two big travel ones are Expedia and Airbnb. I just got back from a hotel year conference last week. And Google had its IO this past week as well.

So it’s just like, wow, it’s summer and I guess that means it’s conference season. I mean, it feels like summer here. At least it’s so beautiful.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah. So let’s see.

2:27

Airbnb Summer Release Highlights

I think the big thing, I’ve been to Airbnb summer release before when they had one big thing that they announced. Today’s was more like a lot of little things.

I would say that the biggest thing I think that they announced was the, well, there were two parts to their services and experiences, which I think have kind of gotten off to a bit of a bumpy start.

They really, they announced those in earnest last year. But now what they’re doing, so I think that the big deal for services are they’re, they’re kind of adding on a lot of services that are probably less sexy, but they make more sense.

If that, like they’re easier to wrap your head around.

Like rental cars, for example, like you can now rent a car on Airbnb. This is brand new. You can never do that before.

So we’ll get into the OTA play in just a moment, but you can rent a car on Airbnb. I know, I can see, I can see the brain going, I can see it going. Okay.

So you can rent a car.

They’ve partnered with Instacart to get groceries delivered and you can get groceries delivered and have it set up at your house before you get there.

That’s kind of cool.

3:48

Scaling Experiences and Services

And then they also, for experiences, they have added the big landmark experiences like going to the Tower of London or going to the Eiffel Tower or like, pick your Golden Gate Bridge, pick your thing that, because before it was more like cook with

Antonio in Rome, who you never ever could have met before. But now it’s like, they’re also gonna let you go to the Coliseum.

Well, this is, I hate to bring up a direct competitor, not a direct competitor, but a competitor at their own conference. Hopefully, Brian can’t hear me. He won’t hear me for a couple of days.

But I think this was a criticism that when we’ve spoken with some of these other platform providers, like Get Your Guide, like Viator, like Kluge, not attributed to any one of them in particular, but just saying in general, when we speak with those

folks, they generally tell us or anyone who works in the space, they say the Airbnb idea, it’s nice, it’s lovely. It’s the platonic ideal of a local’s experience and it doesn’t scale. There’s no inventory. How are you supposed to make money on it?

Because Antonio or Antonio or whoever, Antonio can only sell one class a night for six people. So the addressable market there is inherently limited. You make a nice commission, 15%, but it’s 15% of 50 bucks, 50 bucks times six people.

That’s not enough to pay for that beautiful headquarters in San Francisco. Their rent costs a lot more than that.

So it’s interesting to see them finally kind of acknowledge that and say, all right, how many millions of people are gonna go to the Golden Gate which are gonna go to the Eiffel Tower, are gonna go to Tower of London.

And all right, let’s take 15% off of 10 million transactions instead of six transactions. So that makes a lot of sense to me. It makes a lot of sense to me.

5:43

Hotels Expansion Strategy

And the other thing that they talked a lot about, again, this isn’t new new, but I think it’s just a big expansion on what they were already doing.

He talked a lot about hotels. And he used New York City, which is very funny because in the presentation, Brian is a design guy by training, I suppose.

Yeah, he’s a RISD graduate. Yeah, exactly.

And so through his whole presentation, behind him was the big screen and lots of maps of where all the Airbnbs are and what we’re doing, like the way that they put the presentation together.

But then when he started talking about hotels, he’s like, so let’s talk about New York City and brought up a map of New York City and how many Airbnbs there are there, which is, I mean, this isn’t exactly true, but he said it’s zero.

And he’s like, which brings me to hotels? And so I’m actually interviewing him later, and so I’m going to ask him about this.

But what he said was basically, there are a lot of places where you can’t get an AirBnB, or it’s just not, like, that’s not something that is the best way to do things. And so they are going to list a lot more hotels.

He did say they will be hotels that kind of look and feel like AirBnBs, meaning like small scale, high design, you know, like it’s not, he actually said on stage, it’s not a Holiday Inn.

Like, oh, what did, what did Holiday Inn do to deserve, to deserve this? But yeah.

Holiday Inn Express, one of my favorites. Shout out Holiday Inn. Yeah, exactly.

Well, that sounds a lot like what they said initially about experiences. That when we sell experiences, they will feel like Airbnb experiences. And now you can book the Eiffel Tower.

I wonder if eventually they will be forced to make that pivot from, we’re gonna start with hotels that feel like AirBnBs, and ultimately you do book the Holiday Inn. Why not?

I mean, I could, I would love to have an Instacart delivered to my Holiday Inn. That’s not a service that Holiday Inn offers, it’s a service that AirBnB can offer.

And, I mean, I have to be honest with you, they’ve announced, I mean, you can, you can tell them I said this in your interview, but like they announced Boutique Hotels before the pandemic. Yeah. I mean, what’s new?

It’s just getting bigger, I think.

It’s more cities, it’s more scale. Maybe at the summer release, 2027, holiday and winter.

We’ll be there.

Well, let me ask you, I mean, maybe you, I won’t give you, I won’t push you, but if you wanted to ask him, I would, my question for him, and you can decide whether it’s a good enough question to meet the Sarah Kopit test to ask the CEO of the

largest, one of the most important companies in our space, but I want to know about his thoughts on effectively selling out. largest, one of the most important companies in our space, but I want to know about his thoughts on effectively selling out.

8:21

Selling Out Debate

Airbnb stands for something and it’s not selling anything everywhere all at once. But it does seem like that’s the direction they’re going. And so, you know, it does feel like this experiences thing is going mainstream.

It feels like the hotels thing is going mainstream. Is he, I mean, I don’t think selling out is a bad thing.

By the way, everyone does it.

Or ways to make money.

The Beatles did it, you know, you know, everyone’s got to do it eventually. And it’s great. And they’re iconic for it.

So, you know, Apple did it. I know Brian Chesky looks at the Apple. I don’t know.

I mean, I don’t know. I guess so. I mean, I feel like all these bands do.

I don’t think they did, Seth.

I’m going to stand out. No, I don’t think the Beatles sold out. No, they just got weirder as the years went on.

Much to my joy.

Well, is Wings selling out or is that?

That wasn’t the Beatles.

That wasn’t the Beatles.

Okay.

But let’s refocus, Seth.

You got us off track here. So yeah, but I agree.

I mean, that was kind of the lead to my story that I wrote about this morning, which was, they’re now in the car business, in the grocery business, in the hotel business, and the experience business, all of that.

But I don’t know, I can see, I also can see why, if it’s super easy, and herein lies the design thing. I do think that Airbnb’s app is great.

I love their app.

Yeah, I think their app is great.

And so if you can take that kind of like, you just brought up Steve Jobs before I interrupted you and Apple, like if you can take an Apple-like experience on a travel app, which is what I would equate it to, and do everything you need to do right

You know what’s interesting about that app?

What?

Which is not selling out is what I bet he would say. Yeah, yeah.

10:43

AI Enhancements Not Hype

Well, and you know where else he is refusing to sell out?

Speaking of, he may be selling out on hotels and experiences, and maybe even cars, and I want to come back to cars, but where it doesn’t seem like he’s selling out, and where this is a very long wind-up, where he also has a lot in common with Apple,

is AI. Apple has been very slow to just partner with an open AI or a cloud or whatever, and Brian Chesky seems to have taken those same cues, and just like everyone was like, where’s Apple’s big AI project?

I mean, Airbnb actually tried it, and they actually said, we don’t like this chat interface. I bring it up because we’re talking about app design.

Didn’t Brian Chesky actually say, I don’t like the way that these chat interfaces work, and it’s not, I have a high design standard, it doesn’t live up to my user experience that I’m hoping for?

Yeah, and he did talk a bit today about their new AI enhancements, but that’s what they were. They’re like enhancements. A lot of things where, and I think this is pretty cool.

If you’re looking for a specific thing, let’s say you want to get an Airbnb upstate, and you’re going to Cooperstown with your kids to play baseball, and you want to find a house that is really good for baseball families, you can now put that in and

it will find, the AI will go through, read all the reviews, and whoever has mentioned your particular use case or setup, it will highlight those and bring those to your attention. There’s a lot of comparing that you can do now that you didn’t used to

be able to do. So there are AI enhancements, but they’re not any, to your point, there was no big, huge like, we’re going to do this with AI today.

It feels kind of crazy that almost, well, we come out so now, but dare I say almost punk rock in the year of our Lord, 2026, to have a big summer product update and have your product update be new products, not AI. That feels-

And very people-focused too. There are a lot of people. I’m sure this is by design also because I don’t think Airbnb does much by accident, but there are a lot of people in those images.

It’s all about human beings. This was not a tech. As much as the tech underpins, this was a product, this was a launch about making the experience better for human beings.

Cool.

And how’s the conference itself?

13:19

Conference Vibes and WiFi

I mean, I do want to talk about cars, but that’s going to be my segue, so I want to ask about the conference itself first. What are the vibes like? How’s the food?

Any fancy galas that they’re going to have you attend?

No galas. Although honestly, if I was going to go to a gala, this would be the one that I’d want to go to. I would say, it’s funny the things you notice or the things I notice after going to a lot of these things.

The Airbnb employees are just impeccably dressed. And I don’t mean they’re dressed up. I mean they’ve got the San Francisco casual cool vibe.

Yeah, San Francisco cool kid, for sure.

They’ve got it.

We’re tech, but we’re not really tech, and we’re travel and…

Yeah, but we’re the cool ones, right?

Yeah.

So they’ve got that down. The food is amazing.

The Wi-Fi is slower than I would like, I must say. Yeah.

They did promise us fast Wi-Fi.

That is a common Airbnb complaint, by the way. This is how I review my Airbnbs. By the way, the kitchen was great.

I really enjoyed the food. The Wi-Fi wasn’t what I wanted it to be. That’s a standard Airbnb review here.

I could say, yes, the kitchen here is fantastic.

The food is great.

Wi-Fi is a little slow.

But yeah, so far so good.

14:41

Cars and OTA Convergence

I do want to talk about cars.

Yeah.

Let’s talk about cars because, I mean, that’s what we decided to lead with. That’s the new thing here. And the reason why I thought it was a big deal and probably why your eyes lit up when I said the car thing is that, guess where this takes Airbnb?

This takes it squarely right in the strategy use case business model of our other friend, she’s having a conference today, Expedia and all the rest of them that offer houses, cars and flights. Flights do not come up today, not once.

So because we’ve also written about it.

I mean, it’s getting there. I mean, literally, this is what expedia.com and booking.com or Expedia group and Booking Holdings sell is they sell hotels, short-term rentals, experiences, cars and flights. Airbnb now sells four out of five of those.

Oh, the only thing they don’t sell, imagine cruise. Could you imagine an Airbnb cruise? That’s the one of their product because Expedia does sell a lot of cruise.

If I were to go to a gala and if I were to go on a cruise, Airbnb has done a good enough job with air marketing that that actually might be one I would want to go on.

They do have a lot of houseboats on their platform.

Does that count as selling a cruise? I didn’t know that. Yeah, you can say like the canals in Amsterdam and stuff like that.

Oh, God.

I would never do that.

I would never do that.

But sorry, joking aside about the Airbnb cruise, it’s a free idea, Brian. We just want to shout out for the podcast if you do it. Car rental is a big deal.

And actually, this is a pretty big and lucrative market. And yes, I think it’s kind of funny.

We led with car rental and then Expedia had major car rental news on pretty much the same day, maybe the day before, pretty much the same exact time, which is pretty interesting to see that the space is heating up.

And this, Sarah, this Expedia car rental news was what we would call in the business a scoop. Is that correct?

A scoop, a scoop indeed, yes. That would be-

What’s a scoop for those of those who don’t know?

So, okay.

16:51

Expedia CarTrawler Scoop

So yeah, let’s talk journalism per minute. That’s always fun. So basically there are a few ways that journalists can get stories.

They can do things like I’m doing right now, which is go to an event where the CEO can stand up on stage and tell you what is going on.

And then we can take our big brains and think about it and think about what it means and give our quick take analysis. There can be like breaking news, things that happen in the world that you don’t know are going to happen, but they just, they do.

That’s another way. And then you have the scoop, which is the crown jewel of all types of journalism. And it is everything we want and desire.

And that is when somebody, somebody you know, as the journalist, you know them, but we’re not going to tell you who they are generally. They come to you and they say, I’m not supposed to tell you this, but X, Y, and Z is happening.

And Dennis Schall, our OTA reporter, is a master at getting scoops. And so he, he had this scoop. I don’t know, it was a couple of weeks ago even, I think, about Car Trawler.

So, so yeah.

So the news, which actually, sorry, I’m sorry, it’s not a scoop, it’s actually the straight news that is confirmed today that Dennis’ scoop was accurate, which is that Expedia, which is that Expedia is acquiring Car Trawler.

Car Trawler is a car rental company. They don’t rent cars, not like Hertz, but they are a content data and sort of market and a distribution partner in the car rental space. And it’s a big acquisition.

What’s the price tag again, Sarah?

I want to say $315 million. Is that right? Give or take?

I’d have to check.

I’d have to check. While Seth is checking that, for all of you listeners, I love scoops. And if any of you want to give me one, please do reach out.

You can find me at sarahkopit.01 on Signal if that would make you feel more secure. Do reach out. We take tips all the time here.

I think it’s a big deal.

This transaction is a big deal. And I think it speaks to, well, what do we, I have a couple of thoughts on what this speaks to.

19:06

Car Rental Realities

What do you think about the car rental segment? This isn’t one that we cover super deeply, but it’s really interesting.

Well, I mean, the thing about car rental is that you have a like tangible object involved in the car. It’s that you have to kind of deal with as well. And I think that that is something where you have, that kind of asset on your books.

Is it a profitable business, car rental? I assume that it is. Very?

Yeah.

I don’t know.

It’s a weird thing because where I live or where we live in New York, people rent cars all the time. Then of course, you rent them for business. But like where I grew up in Michigan, people didn’t rent cars at all.

So it’s a geographically based business as well.

Well, I think it’s one of these overlooked spaces. It’s fairly consolidated, so there’s only so many actual people who provide the true cars.

There are always every once in a while some of those like, you ever booked those truly independent car rental companies? That’s always a bit scary for me.

Yeah, never. I’m too worried.

Jeff’s car rental, it does exist.

Yeah.

I won’t even rent a car. When I go to a foreign country, I will do almost anything not to rent a car, because I feel too scared about all of the liability and everything.

I don’t know.

I don’t like renting cars at all, to be honest.

20:41

Mexico Rental Stories

Can I tell you a funny story about car rentals?

Sure.

Absolutely.

My current wife, my now wife, Ali, when she was my girlfriend, when we were dating, we had just started dating. My current wife.

My first wife.

Current wife, now wife. I was looking for my current… She doesn’t listen to this podcast, so it’s okay.

We don’t need to cut that. But my then girlfriend, now wife, Ali, when we first started dating, we took our first trip, we went to Mexico, and she still tells the story and like laughs at it.

And we’d only been dating for a couple of months, and I flew down to Mexico, we flew down separately, and I was down there for like a day or two before.

And I just said to her, you know what, Ali, when you fly down, just pick up a rental car and pick me up, and we’re going to drive to Tulum. And somehow, someway, she said yes.

And I just, and she’s like, she was telling me, I would never do that for you now. Never in a million years would I rent a car by myself in Mexico and drive down the highway by myself through the airport in a foreign country and pick you up.

And I was like, I’m going to be in Playa del Carmen, you fly in, pick up your car, meet me in Playa del Carmen and I’ll drive us the rest of the way to Tulum. And that’s what happens when you’re early in the dating game.

When you’re young and in-laws.

Yeah.

Have I ever told you, like I’m a huge Mexico fan. I want to start out this story by saying, I love Mexico. I’m going in three weeks because you can’t keep me away for too long.

I will not rent a car there, however, because we did this exact same thing. It was a very long time ago. No kids, so 20 years ago, went fluent in Cancun.

We were driving to Holbox though. We were going the other way. But we got the car from Jeff’s car rental in Cancun.

And we got pulled over by police who shook us down. And it was one of the scariest things that’s ever happened to me. And they really knew what they were doing because there were two of them, one on each side, one in each window.

And they were being nice to my husband, but not nice to me. And they were scaring him. And one of them gave the, like, you know, polegro to me.

And Alex was just like, basically, like, how much of all of the money we have do you want? And they took all this. And then we went to Holtwash.

And it was great. And we swam with whale sharks.

And that’s incredible. I would love to dream of mine to swim with a whale shark. But that’s a scary story.

I do it every time we go, which is a lot.

Like it just see, that’s the thing.

I love Mexico and I will go there all the time.

I just want to drive a car there. Swimming with whale sharks is like top-notch bucket list. If you’ve not done it, you’re listening to this podcast.

Go do it.

Do it this summer and send us an email and let us know how it was.

23:46

CarTrawler Deal Math

Okay.

Back to car analysis.

Anyways, I’ve properly stalled while we tell our stories. The purchase price is reported to be $350 million for car trawlers. And I just pulled up some comparative data because Book and Holdings also sells cars.

And they report how many cars they sell. So in the past 12 months, they have sold 86 million car rental nights. So car rental days, I guess they’re called.

So they rented 86 million days worth of cars. What’s the right price for a car rental per day, you think?

If it’s me, Upstate New York, which is when I rent a truck, when I go upstate and inevitably haul stuff around, I would say $70 a day.

All right, let’s multiply that by 70. So it’s like a $6 billion gross bookends business, if that’s correct. If the average, they don’t disclose what it is, and I don’t have any insider information what it is.

We’re just kind of, I think that’s probably about what it is.

86 million car rental days, 70 bucks a day.

They are probably doing $6 billion worth of car rental sales on book and hold ins. That’s the gross book ins. They earn a commission.

The profitability flows from there. But obviously, if Airbnb can get anywhere close to that and can just achieve that, I mean, to add $6 billion of book ins is pretty meaningful for an organization. And so it’s interesting.

I also think it’s interesting because as Dennis reports, Expedia, this is their second B2B acquisition. Their first was a company called Tickets, T-I-Q-E-T-S, which is B2B software in the experience book in space.

So Airbnb has built its experience product and built a car rental product, and Expedia has bought an experience product and bought a car rental product. So there’s a lot of parallelisms going on here. So I think it’s definitely really interesting.

It’s a really interesting space. And I think it’s cool that car rental has become the next focus area.

25:46

Airbnb Versus OTAs

Do you think that Airbnb wants to compete, like go toe-to-toe with Expedia in booking?

Do you think they’re desirous of that? I mean, I’m sure if you ask Brian Chesky, he would say no. But what do you think the real answer is?

They have to.

I think for lack of a better word. It’s like, I’m blanking on his name, Peter Thiel likes to talk about how the best business is a monopoly, competition is for suckers.

I’m sure they think that way and that’s why short-term rentals was a great growth area for them because they had no real competition. The VRBO folks can e-mail me how angry they are that, of course, they had competition, but no real competition.

I feel they built that category in its modern digital form as it exists today from scratch, effectively. I would agree.

But there’s only so much, the lesson that we’ve been talking about for Airbnb forever is that there’s only so much green space in travel. There’s only so much areas where you can say competitions for suckers.

So whether they want to do it or not, or whether they would say that they’re excited to do it or not, they got no choice. Otherwise, they could try and find green space in things like Bookin Massages or food delivery to vacation rentals.

I just don’t think that you get to, we just did this number, this is a five or six billion dollar gross Bookin market that bookin.com just does basically as an ancillary add-on. Why would you ignore that?

Why would you not just pick that up for free if you could?

27:24

Winners And Losers

Yeah.

Shall we do some winners and losers?

Well, yes.

Let’s do some winners and losers.

Or shall we talk about some?

We have to do losers first. We’ve learned our lesson. We have to do losers first, so we don’t end on a bummer.

Yeah.

Do you have a loser?

Because I do have a winner and it’s tied into another story, but I have a winner.

It’s been a pretty good week.

All right. I actually can flip my winner into a loser, if you have a winner in mind and I can go first if you prefer. Go for it.

My loser of the week is OpenAI.

Why on earth?

They’re going to IPO on Friday possibly. The day that this drops, they at least file for their IPO.

Because I was very excited by Google’s IO announcement that they’re going to be doing, they’re going full steam ahead in agentic commerce and agentic bookings.

They’ve announced that they’re going to be doing agentic hotel bookings and OpenAI has said that this is an area that they’re going to step back from.

And so, well, the IPO may be exciting, and obviously it may be cool, and it’s going to get them a lot of hype. I think the real winner, basically it’s, I treat it as a zero-sum game.

And if Google’s the winner of the agentic commerce race, then IPO or no IPO, the only person who stands, I mean, they’re the market leader. So it only stands to reason that they would lose then.

So tell me who your winner is.

Well, it’s going to be Google. It was going to be Google. But I was able to flip it, and of course, I forgot they were having the IPO, so I look like an idiot.

But that’s okay. It’s a convoluted excuse to fit that into this framework of winners and losers. I think it’s really cool that we are, that Google has announced that Hotels is next up in the priority list for agentic commerce.

I think that’s worth a winner, and I think all their competitors who haven’t figured out, it’s worth a loser. I haven’t figured it out yet.

Yeah.

29:20

Proper Hotel Design Wins

So my winner of the week is the proper hotel here in San Francisco.

I do love the proper hotel.

Have you been here?

I’ve been to the proper Los Angeles.

Okay.

Not the one in San Francisco.

Yeah. So I have never stayed at a hotel where I liked the design of the hotel more than this one.

That’s kind of saying a lot.

I mean, I liked it so much I took pictures of it. I spent a lot of my time taking pictures of the light fixtures because I was like, that is so cool how they did this.

That sounds like exactly the right kind of property to be sold on Airbnb, doesn’t it?

Design forward?

I’m sure it is, although it is funny, Seth.

They didn’t have the two things that I always want in a hotel.

Oh, no.

When I’m staying for business, they didn’t have an ironing board, they didn’t have a coffee maker.

Oh, no.

I know.

Oh, no.

But the design was off the hook. One thing I think I’m going to steal, so this is so silly. This is where we get to at the end of every podcast, so I’m happy to keep the tradition going if you’re still listening.

Dear listener, they have black toilet seats, not the whole toilet that is white. Just the toilet seat is black, and it makes it look so much classier than if you just had a white one.

I am going to steal that for my one bathroom pre-war apartment in New York City. I already looked them up on Amazon, $30. They’re not special.

They’re just black, not white.

Just different, just thoughtful.

Yeah. But thoughtful is the right word, chosen. They chose to do that.

That was a choice that somebody made, and it was the right one, and it was a good one, and that is why the proper hotel is my winner this week.

31:22

Luxury Hotel Little Things

My favorite elements of a really nice hotel is, I love the soaps.

Is it good? Do they have good soap?

Oh, yeah. I don’t know how to say it. I don’t know if I’ve ever said that word.

Aesop?

Yes.

Is that the right word?

I think Aesop is right.

Because it’s like Aesop’s cables.

Yeah, I think so.

It smells so good.

I washed my hair last night. It was just divine.

It is so great.

It’s the little things in the hotel design.

Although I wouldn’t say that the shampoo is a little thing. I think those amenities are huge. It is expensive.

I don’t own that stuff in my own life. It’s too expensive for me. Yeah.

Sarah Kopit’s hair doesn’t actually always smell like it does right now.

Just special when I say it in a nice hotel.

There is truly nothing like, I feel bad praising hotels at the end of a conversation. I really focus on Airbnbs. It’s a very different experience, but there is truly nothing like a really nice hotel.

I was just at a hotel conference with Preferred Hotels Group and they do these luxury hotels, and I got to stay in one of their properties. And just a luxury hotel is just so nice. It’s just the best.

32:36

Luxury Travel Shifts

It’s one of those things.

I think that when we first started doing this podcast, we talked about this and we said, do you think that you have ever actually been on a luxury vacation or stayed in a luxury hotel?

And I think that we both said before working for Skift, we would have said yes. And after working for Skift, we both say no.

No, we have not, not really because there is a lot of those hotels and experiences and just things out there that if you’re out there, live in your middle class life, you have no idea they even exist.

You didn’t know that the very wealthy among us could do such things. And I feel like that’s very much the case with travel and luxury travel.

Yeah, I agree. Although what luxury is, I will just get one more thing for experiences in local. Luxury is evolving.

What we find in all of our research is that people want all of those nice little things.

They want the towels, they want the nice bathrooms, they want the nice soaps, and they want to meet a local, and they want to do a local experience, and they want to eat local food.

33:53

Chasing Brian Chesky

Brian just walked by.

I just saw him.

Did he?

Yeah, he did. I’m tempted to see Phil come and say hi.

Can we get him to say hi? No. Oh my gosh.

Can she pull it off, folks?

I tried. He went into the room already. I tried.

I did.

He’s a busy guy. Well, I think this goes to show you’re in an active situation. You’re chasing down subjects and interviewees and I know you’ve got a conversation with him.

Tell Brian hello from everyone at the Skift team. I will. Ask him some good, tough questions.

I know our audience will appreciate it.

I will. I promise.

34:26

Wrap Up And Goodbye

All right.

See you guys next week.

We’ll maybe talk about it a little bit. Bye.