Past the Tipping Point, but is That Enough
In Ed Watkin’s article, “Has Airbnb reached it’s tipping point,” he is discussing if Airbnb has enough power to take over the accommodations industry. It’s clear to him that they have the tipping power to be a large contender in the industry. What Watkin’s explains is that public policy is trying to reduce Airbnb’s power in many different ways. Because Airbnb allows people to operate “illegal hotels”, there are negative effects to the hotel industry. New York City passed a law to make it illegal to advertise short-term rentals on Airbnb. San Francisco created a regulation that tries to make Airbnb pay $50 to register each listing with the city. Other places like Seattle, Boston, and Chicago are thinking about implementing similar policy. Currently Airbnb is fighting everything it can. We will see soon, if these policies actually stop Airbnb’s takeover.
In this article, there is a great discussion on technology tipping points. Even though the title of the article wouldn’t suggest it, it seems as though Watkins agrees that Airbnb has passed it’s acceptance tipping point. In class we learned that the tipping point is percentage of people that need to use a technology for the technology to stay in use with the population. Airbnb has been around for a few years and is used by a large percentage of people that travel and that percentage has only been increasing. Based on the article, it seems that these public policies and the American Hotel and Lodging Association are trying to lower Airbnb back under it’s tipping point. They are using scare tactics and obstacles to make Airbnb less appealing. If they successfully get Airbnb behind it’s tipping point, their usage percentage would eventually fade to zero. The groups are also trying to utilize the threshold model to hurt Airbnb. According to the threshold model, people usually have a percentage of friends that use technology before they will switch to that technology. If these policies can initially stop a few people from using Airbnb, there may be a sort of opposite cascade where people stop using Airbnb, because not enough of their friends use it. Airbnb needs to make sure the benefit of the product overshadows the negatives put forth by cities in order to guarantee that doesn’t happen.
Source: http://www.hotelnewsnow.com/Articles/56518/Has-Airbnb-reached-its-tipping-point