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Editorial comment
23•04•19 Welcome to the latest Short Term Rentalz weekly newsletter!
• Two pieces of news concerning Airbnb caught the headlines this week as it officially acquired HotelTonight and completed a $160m Series B funding round with Lyric.
The HotelTonight deal, which was mooted last month, marks a period of rapid growth for the hotel booking service, after a 41 per cent year-over year increase in booked rooms in 2019's first quarter.
The service aims to make last-minute trips easy and enjoyable, by offering travellers an efficient, on-demand booking for boutique and independent hotels. This latest collaboration will see HotelTonight facilitate a connection between the world’s best hotels and Airbnb’s global community.
HotelTonight's app and website will continue operating as they do today, while co-founder and CEO, Sam Shank, will lead the boutique hotel category at Airbnb.
Airbnb president of homes Greg Greeley said: "The HotelTonight team has a tremendous passion for helping guests and rich industry expertise. We are more than thrilled to have them on board.”
In addition, Airbnb is looking to work with hybrid operators such as San Francisco-based apartment provider Lyric, for which it helped to raise $160m in a Series B financing round.
Launched back in 2014, Lyric specialises in leasing apartment units and floors, refurbishing and transforming them into hotel-style properties for business travellers. This latest investment of capital brings the total funding raised by the company to $185m after a $15.5m Series A round last year.
Lyric says it caters its spaces to professional travellers who are seeking accommodation for between two and 200 days on various rental platforms. Its co-founder and CEO, Andrew Kitchell, said the investment would help to expand the company's operations and develop its tech and data platform.
He said: "We’re incredibly excited to have Airbnb, the company that reinvented how we travel, along with renowned real estate partners and elite investors believing in us at Lyric to create a new category of accommodations for the modern traveller.”
In the grand scheme of things, Airbnb is showing its ambition to reimagine travel by building an all-in-one portal which will cater for all types of guests and accommodations and inform travellers about what activities they can do and by what means they can travel.
Furthermore, it will be interesting to see how Airbnb's funding of Lyric plays out as the latter follows in the footsteps of other startups that have branched into the so-called "soft brand rental business". Only time will tell if Lyric opts to go down a similar route to the boutique hotel rental startup Sonder, which recently opened an Airbnb-hotel hybrid in Denver.
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Paul Stevens, reporter
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