Vrbo Takes a Commanding Lead, Leaving Airbnb Far Behind
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps #106 - Playing with the Big Boys. Check out the full article for more insights.
Spring is officially, here and with it, the hope that things will be going back to normal soon. Judging by the downloads, they slowly are.
This week I saw an interesting trend developing that's somewhat of a follow-up to an app I looked at not too long ago – Airbnb competitor Vrbo.
As travel becomes more comfortable, so does the need for an app to find a place to stay. Outside of hotels, which I'll analyze in a future article, that app used to be Airbnb. Its only similar competitor, Vrbo, used to spike from time to time, but overall it wasn't really a competitor.
That seems to be changing.
Since the beginning of 2022, Vrbo's downloads have been moving up and to the right consistently, breaking the app's own records for single-day downloads over and over.
Its latest high, this Monday (3/21) saw 67K new downloads in a single day, according to our estimates. Vrbo climbed to this number from around a half in January.
We've seen Vrbo peak in the past, and based on the data, I expected it to be more about paid user acquisition than about organic (aka. real) demand. Is that still the case now? Is Vrbo a name enough people know about? What's Airbnb doing wrong?
It's too early to tell, but it's nice to see that there's an alternative.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
