I am not the only one. Airbnb registered nearly 1m guests on 8 August 2015, the peak day of the summer season. Last month Reuters reported (citing unnamed investors) that the 2008 start-up is expecting 80m nights booked this year - double the number in 2014. The last fundraising round, in June, valued Airbnb at $25.5bn, making it the third most valuable venture-capital-backed company in the world.
But both InterContinental Hotels (IHG), which runs 726,876 rooms across the globe under brands including Crowne Plaza and Holiday Inn, and Whitbread (WTB), which owns Premier Inn in the UK, told investors this week that their businesses had not seen any impact from the rise of Airbnb. InterContinental argued on a third-quarter conference call that the portal might be hitting operators in the leisure or budget hotel market, but that its brands, which cater predominantly to business travellers, remain unaffected. How plausible is this narrative of immunity?
The numbers being posted by hotel companies certainly show little sign of weakness. Premier Inn continues to expand rapidly, with an 8 per cent increase in rooms over the half-year to 27 August. Impressively, that growth did not come at the expense of room rates. Against a background of very low inflation, revenue per available room (RevPAR) - a key industry metric that combines the effects of room rates and occupancy - rose 4.6 per cent even as average occupancy fell marginally.
Meanwhile, InterContinental saw its third-quarter RevPAR rise 4.8 per cent on a like-for-like basis. That was slightly slower than in the first half, when growth was 5.1 per cent. But it was better than the market had been expecting, and the shares rose 7 per cent on the day of the announcement. Wyn Ellis of stockbroker Numis (NUM) attributes the bounce in part to the Chinese figures being "not that bad". Third-quarter RevPAR in China, which accounts for roughly a tenth of InterContinental's business, fell 0.7 per cent year on year even without the impact of the renminbi devaluation. But given the high-profile plunge in the Shanghai equity market this summer, investors had apparently been braced for worse.
Another worry has been slowing growth in the US. InterContinental reported RevPAR growth of 4.2 per cent in the country in the third quarter, down from 4.8 per cent in the second quarter and 6.6 per cent in the first. This trajectory helps explain why the company's shares, after a very strong run, have fallen 5 per cent this year, underperforming the FTSE 100 index.
One reason for the US slowdown is that hotel rooms in the country are getting expensive. They now cost $128 a night on average, according to STR Global - well ahead of the previous peak of $107 in 2008, even adjusting for inflation. These prices are being driven by limited supply as much as strong demand. Hotels are hugely capital-intensive and, until recently, banks have been reluctant to lend. That is just starting to change, and the supply pipeline is now building up.
But the stock of spare rooms let out to travellers via Airbnb massively expands that supply beyond the numbers given by industry researchers. This insight is the basis of a polemical research note issued this month by Ian Rennardson, an analyst at Jefferies. He argues that the current cyclical pressure on US RevPAR growth will be "intensified by the sharing economy" - in other words, by the vast capacity added to the market by Airbnb and its imitators. Mr Rennardson has therefore downgraded his 2016-17 forecasts for the major players, although US owner-operators Hilton and Starwood come off much worse than InterContinental, Whitbread or Millennium & Copthorne (MLC), with their 'asset-light' models.
As Mr Rennardson points out, the precedent of budget airlines shows how new, low-cost business models can drag down pricing in an industry - even for those operators that once argued they were in a different market segment. Just as easyJet (EZY) has taken business travellers from British Airways, so might Airbnb, which has a special programme to help them file expenses. Yet budget airlines also show how long it can take, given regulation and entrenched interests, for market disruption to play out. Hotel pricing will surely come under pressure eventually. But Mr Rennardson may be hasty in expecting the Airbnb revolution to topple the incumbents as soon as next year.
