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Airbnb Dethrones Google As the Best Tech Company To Work For In the US
An anonymous reader writes: Career website Glassdoor today released its eighth annual Employees' Choice Awards, a list of the 50 best companies to work for in the coming year. Airbnb was picked as the number one tech company to work for in 2016, displacing Google. Airbnb didn't even make the list last year. Google, meanwhile, placed sixth in 2013 and 2014, and first in 2015. As with Google last year, it's worth noting that Airbnb hasn't just taken the top tech company spot: It is the top company overall.
I tried to rent a place through Airbnb. The process went like so:
Me: I'm looking for a room for next tuesday.
Airbnb: What's your Facebook login?
Me: Do I look like an idiot?
Airbnb: How about your G+ account?
Me: I must look like an idiot.
So that was that. I haven't given them a second chance.
Airbnb allows normal people to earn money by renting out spare rooms,
It doesn't "allow" it. Either the law has already allowed it, or it's outlawed, and no private company changes that.
In places where it's allowed, people have been doing this since pretty much forever. In places where it's regulated, people have also been doing this since pretty much forever - sometimes staying within regulations, and sometimes not.
at the expense of big corporate hotel chains.
If you think the two alternatives are "Airbnb room" and "Big Corporate Hotel Chains", either you're incredibly lazy or you have something to gain from getting people to believe this. Since you say you've rented out on Airbnb, it sounds like the latter.
It is silly to say they are a sign of rampant corporate domination.
A dominant, leeching middleman which doesn't actually do anything but act as an agent or transaction processor is the epitome of corporate domination.
They are the opposite. They are an enabler for the common people.
Again, "Airbnb room" and "Big Corporate Hotel Chains" are no dichotomy. "Has a spare room to let out" is hardly the position of "the common people", either! although I suppose everyone likes to think that the dividing line crosses through them: they can either be common or elite, depending on which way helps their argument.
Disclaimer: I have been both a room renter and a room rentee on Airbnb. It was a good deal in both directions.
k, maybe it's your thing to stay at someone else's home, but N.B. Airbnb rooms aren't actually cheaper in the US on average than mid-range hotel accommodation. Airbnb, like e.g. Uber, is primarily a marketing company, so I understand that it's great at selling of superior quality in every case, when in fact you're buying a different product, and value for money may depend a lot on the when and the where.
I do I.T. support for a company that's heavily involved with the hotel and travel industry, and just got back from the annual company meeting. One of the discussion topics given to a panel of experts there was the impact of AirBnB. The consensus was that it ranges from "not a concern at all" to "relatively helpful to business".
While admitting that the details depend a lot on which city you're talking about, there was definitely the opinion that in many good markets for the hotel industry, they have no problems achieving maximum (or near maximum) occupancy whenever corporate events come to town, or it's "tourist season" in the area. That's really what these guys live for. (It's not such a big deal if your big corporate hotel is relatively empty sometimes, if it rakes in big bucks for 3 months each summer, plus every 3-5 days or so in a row that some big convention is in town, and a few other key times of year like New Years' Eve or the Thanksgiving holiday.)
The smaller hotels/motels that are really worried about Johnny Q. Public who wants the cheapest room deal possible, and would happily go the AirBnB route to save a few more bucks are in a completely different category. In other words, AirBnB competes with the seedy family-owned motels more than the big corporate chains like Marriott.