Airbnb SWOT Analysis and Identity Verification

Read about Airbnb's SWOT Analysis, Identity Verification, and proposed tactics for growth in Asia. The article discusses the impact of political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental factors on Airbnb's operations. It also explores the potential of Airbnb's identity verification system as a new revenue stream. Subject: Business, Course Code: NA, Course Name: NA, College/University: NA

Contents
1. Airbnb Introduction.............................................................................................. 2
2. Airbnb SWOT Analysis.......................................................................................... 3
3. Identity Verification.............................................................................................. 5
4. Opportunities:...................................................................................................... 7
5. Porter’s Five Forces Analysis (Airbnb)..................................................................9
6. Threat of substitutes.......................................................................................... 10
7. References......................................................................................................... 12

1. Airbnb Introduction
The popular global online platform for short-term accommodation lodging and
tourist experience, also known as “sharing economy” Airbnb, has markets in more
than 190 countries, 34,000 cities, 1.5 million hosts and receive above 50 million
guests each year. Airbnb is valued at 38 billion with over 164 million bookings
(Forbes, 2018).
The unrivaled company’s mission of “home away from home” is appealing to the
mass market, benefits, empower millions of people to become hospitality
entrepreneurs and disrupted the hotel industry by providing a flexible an alternative
option for accommodation on demand.
A successful business model with superb technology platform to facilitate millions of
travelers each year, Airbnb diversified its potential streams of revenue to steadily
attract investors to develop new travel products that will heighten investments and
power long-term growth.
The strong executive team has forged key partnerships with government regulators
and policymakers to ensure continuous agreement in allowing its business to run
sustainably across the globe.
Beyond this year, Airbnb further its platform and prepare for its Initial Public
Offering in 2020.
Airbnb BMC:

2. PESTLE Analysis:
Political environment
The political environment will definitely have negative impact on the overall
operations of the company. This is due to the fact that this is a multinational
organization that is operating in different countries with different political
environments. The political environment gives results to the legislature, rules, and
regulations applicable to a business organization. In addition to the rules and
regulations applicable to business organizations operating in rental housing market
can be more complicated as compared to other industries. Therefore management
will be required to research and keep themselves updated about rules and
regulations in order to protect themselves from political factors.
Basic business concept of Airbnb is based on sharing economy. With the help of its
business activities this organisation has been creating jobs and opportunities. On
the other hand it is also affecting current industry model in which traditional
organisations are operating such as hotels. Pressure from large scale hotel
organisations are also affecting the manner in which politicians are taking decisions
with respect to operations of business organisations like Airbnb. One of the
primary reason that rules and regulations on this type of organisation are very strict
as compared to other hotel organisations.
Economic factors
Economic factors will have a positive impact on overall operations of the company
as overall structure of the company can be altered in accordance with the economy
in which it is operating. One of the primary advantages of using Airbnb is that it
helps in providing cheap rental alternatives to people. In addition to that they can
also help in providing luxury services to the customers (Sedlacek, 2016). Therefore
it can be said that this organization will operate in any kind of economy whether
such economy is stagnant, developed or growing.

Organisations like Airbnb are affecting the economy in positive manner by creating
job opportunities and source of income for homeowners. On the other hand it is
affecting the hotel industry in negative manner as similar services as hotels are
provided by Airbnb at lower cost.
Social environment
The current social environment of different countries will be helpful for growing
business of Airbnb. This is due to the fact that significant proportion of customers
are willing to use services of Airbnb as they are tired of renting hotels and motels.
Business organizations like Airbnb help in providing different experience which is
generally preferred by the customer (Della Corte, 2016). The social attitude of
customers is changing significantly and it will have positive impact on growth
perspectives of the company. Airbnb also provide home away home experience to
their end customer where they make guest as home to bonding with other
neighbourhood in another city.
Technological environment
One of the most important factors that are contributing to the success of business
organizations like Uber, Airbnb other online platform organizations is advancement
in technology. In addition to that frequently used of mobiles and internet is
providing platform for customers as well as suppliers in case of Airbnb. Any person

can list their house on Airbnb and customers can rent out these houses after
agreeing to the terms and conditions of the renter (Pan, Le and Wenting, 2018). It
can be said that technology will always have positive impact on this type of
organization. It’s give an opportunity to their guest and host to utilize service over
finger tips.
Legal environment
The legal environment can have negative impact on operations of the company as
legal environment of each country in which it is operating will be different from each
other. The business organization will be required to analyse legal requirements
provided by government of every organization and business strategies accordingly.
The impact of the legal environment will not be very high if it is managed in
effective manner by hiring legal experts in each of the countries.
Business concept of air b and b is unique and different from other service sector
organisations. Introduction of new business concept is always very difficult from
legal perspective as it result in development of new rules and regulations
specifically applicable on unique businesses such as Uber and Airbnb. In addition to
that Airbnb is also required to follow all the rules and regulations in relation to
tourism of each and every country in which it is established. Management of
different rules and regulations will be very difficult for the organisation. For
example, people are not allowed to rent out their properties in New York unless they
are living there. In several cities homeowners are required to pay tourism tax if they
are renting out their property to tourists. It can be said that legal environment will
have a negative impact on operations of the company.
Environmental factors
Operations in business organizations like Airbnb will not have a significant impact
on consumption of energy and other resources that are essential for environment.
Various studies have been conducted and it was identified that consumption of
electricity and other resources in hotel industry is significantly higher (Kuo et.al,
2016). It can be said that these industries will not have any problem to deal with
environmental laws and regulations in different countries. Another research show
that Airbnb guest consume much less water, electricity and other service which help
us make echo friendly.

3. Airbnb SWOT Analysis
Strengths
* Brand Recognition
* Worldwide presence
* Largest inventory of accommodation (Hartmans
2017)
* 150 million strong userbase (Davis 2018)
* Round the clock customer service
* Proficient in digital marketing
* Low cost of revenue
* Generates revenue from both ends of the platform -
suppliers and users
* Multiple verticals to diversify revenue stream
* Healthy cashflow due to nature of business 1
* Already profitable startup
Weaknesses
* Never fully in control of own reputation 2
* Low barrier to entry
* Violates zoning laws in most jurisdictions
* Exposed on multiple fronts as disrupting various
industries 3
* Established industry opponents with strong
lobbyists
* Bargaining power of suppliers are very high
* Required to mediate disputes between suppliers
and users
* A CEO that does not wish for the company to go
public (Carson 2018)
Opportunities
* Rise of low cost carriers and growing affluency in
the world
* Balance of population in the world starts to shift to
Millenials and Gen Z (Miller and Lu 2018)
* Penetration into corporate travel
* Yield Management to maximize revenue
* Zeitgeist of reducing carbon footprint 4
* Identity verification could be their AWS equivalent
* Verticals targeting other tourism receipts
Threats
* Unfavorable legislation
* Constantly embroiled in legal challenges
* Negative impact of increasing traditional rental
charges and constraining housing supply will turn
public opinion against Airbnb
* Competitors are mushrooming
* Established industries entering the same market
* Rise of capsule/pod hotels 5
* Trying to do too many things at the same time
increases risk of losing focus

4. Alternative opportunity
Different issues have been identified that are affecting effective and efficient growth
of Airbnb in Asian market. Some of the alternative solutions that can be helpful in
increasing growth rate will be as follows-
Merger and acquisition- Airbnb can purchase other business organizations that are
operating on a similar platform in Asian market. Merger and acquisition are one of
the fastest and simplest methods of rapid growth in business operations (Bravo-
Biosca, Chiara and Carlo, 2016). In addition to that it will also help in providing
human resources that have experience in a particular market where Airbnb has
been operating for the first time.
This method was rejected due to the fact that business organizations that are
operating on a similar platform as Airbnb are very limited. If management proceeds
with merger and acquisition of organizations that are little different from Airbnb
then it will be difficult to operate and the probability of financial risk will increase. At
this time it will not be appropriate to execute this strategy due to non-availability of
similar business structures.
Market expansion- Expansion of products and services offered by Airbnb in different
parts of Asia can also be an effective method of growing in Asia. This is strategy was
also rejected by the organization due to current economy of Asian market (Walters,
2017). The majority of the countries in Asia are still under development and it will
affect overall revenue of the organization and at this point in time making heavy
investment in Asian market might not be very wise.

5. Proposed tactics
Since Airbnb one of the key focuses to grow in Asia in hospitality area, to
understand the company tactics is very important factor to success. Some of the
solutions to increase the growth rate in Asian market will be as follows-
Phased investment- First of all management is required to ensure that heavy
investment is not made suddenly in the Asian market as it can have negative
impact on overall revenue of the company. Management is required to conduct
market research to identify specific parts of different countries in which such model
can be effectively operated. After conducting this research management is required
to expand the business in phase i.e. expansion can be done city by city (Döckel and
Ligthelm, 2015). If this application shows positive response for customer in a
particular city then it can be expanded on national level in such country.
Choosing developing countries
For the purpose of expansion, the management of Airbnb should focus on
developing countries in Asia. The overall growth rate in economy of developing
countries will be helpful in value addition to the company. In addition to that unique
business ideas are very popular in developing countries as they are relative renew
business concepts. It is recommended that management should focus on
development of Airbnb in India and Singapore during the initial phase. In addition to
that specific city of these countries are required to be analysed with the help of
Pestle analysis (Davis, 2016).
Market research
Market research will be the most important factor that will help in analysing the
countries or specific areas of Asian market that will be beneficial in accordance with
business concept of Airbnb. For the purpose of this research management is
required to analyse whether business concept of Airbnb will be successful in Asian
market with the help of collecting primary data.

6. Identity Verification
As a company that provides platform for allowing strangers into other strangers’
homes, safety and security is paramount for the success of the company. After a
couple of back to back horror stories widely covered by the media where homes
were ransacked by renters and a host becoming victims of identity thefts by
renters, Airbnb first announced the creation of a Trust and Safety department in
2011 and the recruitment of a top tier security consulting firm, Command
Consulting Group (Pawlowski 2011). Since then it has added a various security
features, the most prominent of which is the identification verification by uploading
a government issued identity card in 2013 (Ngak 2013).
These precautions were unfortunately not enough as more cases appear of a male
host pretending to be female and drugging renters (Jose 2013), a renter being
sexually assaulted by his transgender host (Lieber 2015), a paedophile listing a
cupboard for rent a la Harry Potter’s room (Meyjes 2017), et cetera.
Amazon Web Services
In the course of trying to launch a portal for third party merchants to create online
shopping sites on top of their e-commerce engine, Amazon realized that since their
inception in 1994, they had never prepared well for future requirements.
Development of products had been too compartmentalized and yet tangled in a
disorganized way with each other. This issue was resolved with a set of well-
documented de-coupled API-accesses. At around the same time period, Jeff Bezos
realized that even with mass hiring of software engineers it was taking the same
amount of time to build an application. This was because for any new project, too
much time and resources were being spent by the teams on creating the basic
frameworks of a project from scratch: either the database, computing or storage
facilities. This was resolved by creating some common infrastructure services.
(Miller 2016)
By taking the steps to resolve the two problems above they had unwittingly created
a new core competency, one that would in a few years’ time be developed into the
Amazon Web Services. It is our suggestion that Airbnb’s efforts to build trust and
security in their platform could one day be their equivalent to Amazon’s AWS.
Why it makes sense
Out of necessity to improve their trust and safety performance, in 2017 Airbnb
acquired Trooly, a start-up company that performs machine learning driven
background authentication of profiles using data from digital footprints, history in
social media, the dark web, publicly available registers of offenders, etc (Lomas
2016). This acquisition combined with their already existing infrastructure and
database of users and hosts are a veritable treasure trove of information that can
effectively link an online persona to the real person behind it and then give each
profile a rating of trust and safety. In the course of solving a business challenge,

Airbnb has also created a core competency akin to AWS. This capability of
identifying a profile goes beyond what the current top five technology companies
(Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google) can currently do.
Even an intimate and intrusive company like Facebook do not have the capability to
sort out the fake profiles effectively. The most recent and glaring example of this
failure is the scandal of Russian interference in the United States 2016 presidential
election where Russian covert operatives created multiple fake Facebook profiles to
engage and divide Americans (United States House of Representatives, Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence 2018).
Facebook does a lot to combat the proliferation of fake accounts. In the first quarter
of 2019 alone, Facebook reported that they had removed 2.2 billion fake accounts
(Stewart 2019). This is almost as much as their existing userbase of 2.7 billion
accounts. Even with those removal, Facebook estimated that 5% of their Monthly
Active Userbase (MAU) are fake accounts. This means 116 million profiles currently
live in Facebook are fakes. Jack Nicas writing for The New York Times has however
correctly identified that this estimate is ultimately just guesswork and statistics
suggest that the number of fake accounts in Facebook are much more than 5%
(Nicas 2019).
It is our suggestion that Airbnb’s core competency of identity verification could one
day be developed into a new vertical of revenue stream. The market is now
accustomed to technology companies offering various products that varies from
their original value proposition. Amazon as an ecommerce retailer that offers cloud
computing services, Netflix transitioning from a media services provider to a full-
fledged production house, Apple offering payment solutions and Google developing
autonomous driving cars. And with the identity verification industry already valued
USD 6 billion in 2019 and expected to grow to USD 12.8 by 2024, primarily driven
by cloud-based identity verification solution (Research and Markets 2019), it would
make sense for Airbnb to capitalize on a core competency to create a new revenue
stream and offer Verification-as-a-Service. And the best part of this suggestion is
that all the resources are already available within the company as one of their core
competencies (ANSWERING QUESTION 3)
There are many use cases for this scenario, Facebook as mentioned above would
certainly be able to benefit from such a service, where an identity verification is
done before a profile is created thereby saving them the time and resources to vet
and remove new fake accounts.
Rising industries such as online banks, micro lenders and peer to peer lenders
would also be able to benefit tremendously from the existence of such a service.
Rachel Botsman argued in her 2012 TED Talk, trust is the currency of the new
economy (Botsman 2012). And as Airbnb mature and improve this core
competency, they are perfectly poised to be the adjudicator of this new currency.

In the United States alone, there were 16.7 million victims of identity fraud in 2017
resulting in financial loss of USD 16.8 billion (Javelin 2018).

7. Opportunities:
Globally, the tourism industry has been growing steadily. International tourist arrival
has increased substantially since 2005. It is forecasted that it will exceed 1.8billion
by 2030 ("Topic: Global Travel And Tourism Industry" 2018). Pololikashvili,
Secretary General of World Tourism Organisation state that key drivers to this
growth are the advent of technological changes, affordable air travels, economic
growth in many regions and new business models (Pentol 2019).
("Global Consumers Embrace The Share Economy" 2014)
A report by McKinsey & company states that sharing economy is a key driver to the
growing travel and tourism industry. The transparency of this business model paired
with its easy interactions and payments makes it appealing (Dichter and Sietzman
2017).
The acceptance of sharing economy and steady growth of travel and tourism
industry prove to be a great opportunity for Airbnb.

8. Porter’s Five Forces Analysis (Airbnb)
Threat of new entrants
There are various forms of lodging. However, threat of new entrant in the industry
specifically to Airbnb, is relatively low for multiple reasons.
1. The capital needed to sustain the business. Hypothetically, it is easy for
anyone or a company to start a marketplace offering lodging. However, to
continuously grow, funding will be required. To source for an investor could
be difficult for a new entrant. Scepticism among investors is expected as the
business is no longer niche and it is already dominated by Airbnb.
2. Time of entry will be another reason as to why threat would be relatively low.
With the advent of e-commerce, the first mover advantage has become more
important than ever. Today, with more than 7 million listings globally, Airbnb
is leaving little of the market to new entrants ("Fast Facts - Airbnb
Newsroom" 2019).
3. Law and regulations in various countries is also a barrier to new entrants. As
is, it is common knowledge that Airbnb struggles with regulations in various
cities. Tremendous amount of resources and experience will be required to

manage a wide array of legal matters. This can be a major deterrent for a
new entrant.

9. Threat of substitutes
It can be concluded that threat of substitutes is low. There are existing alternatives
such as traditional hotels, hostels, bed and breakfast inn and of course, switching
cost is non-existential for customers. The up and coming, Onefinestay, has
similarities to Airbnb with rental of some of the most expensive apartments in major
("Luxury Vacation Rental Apartments & Homes | Onefinestay" 2019). Many of the
upcoming competitors are positioning themselves with a niche of their own. These,
however, are not a direct substitution.
Bargaining power of suppliers
Suppliers in this case would be the accommodation hosts. International tourist
arrival is forecasted that it will exceed 1.8billion by 2030 ("Topic: Global Travel And
Tourism Industry" 2018). It can easily be concluded that the number of buyers
definitely is far greater than suppliers. Paired with little to no direct substitution to
Airbnb, the bargaining power of suppliers is low.
Bargaining power of buyers
Bargaining power of buyers is moderate despite the overwhelming number of
international tourist arrival. There is no direct substitution to what Airbnb offers and
for buyers who falls under this segment, the propensity to change service provider
will be limited.
Rivalry among existing firm
Airbnb has experienced significant growth since its inception. Just in America, the
sharing economy user is growing consistently and is projected to continue as
illustrated below. This popularity is also set to be on the rise worldwide. Such rapid
and stead growth is bound to entice new players into the market.

There has also been a diverse range of emerging competitors in recent time such as
Flipkey, Turnky and Homeaway. Each of these companies has positioned
themselves with a niche. Homeaway targets the older traveller segment, while
Turnkey allows freedom of coming and going as and when by just providing
travellers door codes. These competitors though are no direct substitution still
poses as threats to Airbnb. Therefore, it can be concluded the rivalry among
competitors is intense.
Evaluation
Despite the threat of substitution is low today, it will change rather rapidly. The
industry at large is beginning to see a lot more alternatives with various niches. It is
also worth noting that the sharing economy is relatively new which will entice new
entrants. Soon enough, the industry will be saturated and competition will be on the
rise. However, it pays to note that in most cases price is a key driver with the
millennial generation making up the biggest mix of buyers. Therefore, competitive
pricing and service excellence will be essential for Airbnb to stay at the top of the
game. Lastly, due to the potential spike in competition, Airbnb needs to expand its
listing pool and business services to diversify. It would be wise to also maintain a
good relationship with suppliers. It will be critical to the continuous growth of the
business.

10. Recommendations

11. Conclusion

12. References
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 ++++
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 +++++
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+++++
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