Airbnb leads online marketplace ranking
Worldwide: Andressen Horowitz’s Marketplace 100 list, a ranking of consumer-facing marketplaces, is full of tech-centred vacation companies.
Leading the list is short-term rental leader Airbnb, with the company accounting for 38 per-cent of gross merchandise value of all polled companies.
Other companies listed on the ranking include vacation rental management company Vacasa, who clocked in at ninth, and a variety of tour marketplaces and RV rentals. Some of the fastest growing marketplaces include ResortPass, the Santa Monica online booking platform, and Vacatia, a resorts marketplace.
The rankings have been compiled through a partnership between Horowitz and Second Measure, a firm that analyses purchase data. The data excludes business to business marketplaces and transactions data outside of the United States.
Polled data includes real-time consumer spending behaviour from December 2018 to November 2019.
The group saw Airbnb taking up 95 per-cent of the market volume with regard to travel, with more dominance over any business sector than any of its similarly sized competitors. This, in one of the categories that has the highest available volume of any polled.
Airbnb’s dominance is a key notable factor for the travel industry as a whole, with the other ten companies polled on the list taking up five percent of the entire gross merchandise value.
Bennet Carrocio and Andrew Chen, partners at the firm, said: “Within the travel segment, Airbnb is the runaway leader. Of course, these days, Airbnb’s primary competitive set includes large, public companies focused on travel, as opposed to other startups.”
“It is a single, global network, which provides a strong defensible moat that, thus far, competitors have struggled to copy.”
This news comes amidst relative struggles for Airbnb, as they plan out a path to an IPO this year. The group revealed losses of $322 million in the first nine months of 2019, as well as having suspended listings in Beijing in response to the coronavirus.
