This is what hockey-stick growth looks like: Peer-to-peer lodging marketplace Airbnb announced this morning that it’ll top 10 million guest stays since being launched in 2007. That’s a big number, for sure, but the bigger overall point is that the company had more than 6 million guest stays on the platform in 2013, more than doubling its total over the past year.
Of course, we kind of knew this was coming, based on dataAirbnb had shared in October . Back then it touted 9 million stays, so it’s added another million in the past two months alone.
The company’s user base continues to skew international. Of the 6 million guest stays over the past year, about a third were American. The company has said in the past that about 75 percent of its stays have an international component — that is, either a foreign guest staying in a U.S.-based property or a U.S. guest staying in a foreign property, or a non-U.S. guest staying in a non-U.S. property — so that’s not surprising.
But the distribution of guests to lodgings has a funny sort of symmetry: Airbnb says that travelers from more than 175 different countries used the platform over the past year, staying in listings from more than 175 different countries.
While Airbnb has seen really impressive demand, its supply of listings has also grown dramatically in 2013. More than 250,000 properties have been added to the platform over the past year, bringing the total number of listings to 550,000 worldwide.
The company has added more than 50,000 in the past month alone,when Airbnblaunched new mobile apps to facilitate the process of adding your home to the platform.
Airbnb’s big year came after the company raised US$200 million in funding from Founder's Fund last fall. The company has been using that funding to aggressively expand worldwide, something that appears to be working out.
Source: TECHinASIA
