Skift Take
When asked a few years ago whether Booking.com was a disruptor, CEO Glenn Fogel said “no.” Online travel companies should show their innovation, not make extreme boasts.
Dennis Schaal
Online Travel Today
If your business’s shareholder letter announcing earnings requirements to consistently advertise how ingenious your organization is or how the visitor experience you provide is among “uncompromising quality,” are you actually a bit insecure about everything?
As author Ernest Hemingway recommended about the very best writing: Program, don’t inform.
In earnings reports, simply let the numbers and their descriptions do the talking. It’s best to lose all of that extreme fluff.
Airbnb is one of the chief professionals of public relations-strewn profits reports in the online travel/short-term rental sector, and Sonder tends to dip in. A lot of companies in other sectors self-promote to a fault, too, and marketing-heavy earnings missives and announcements seem a trend.
In its first quarter shareholder letter, Airbnb cites its 1. “flexibility and unrelenting development,” 2. “our culture of ruthless development,” 3. “our developments are motivating visitors,” and 4. “our developments, including our new Host on-boarding circulation and our Ask a Superhost program.”
This occurs as hosts are emailing me screenshots of what they state are “thousands” of hosts grumbling in various forums, consisting of Airbnb’s neighborhood platform here, that their listings have actually gone “stagnant,” or unexpectedly their reservations dried up or vanished following Airbnb’s latest classifications upgrade. Airbnb has 4 million hosts around the globe so it’s tough to quantify simply how pervasive the belief is, however it is considerable.
You might chalk this as much as routine glitches that happen with product introductions, but hosts have actually long complained about problems with Airbnb’s back-end tech. Airbnb undoubtedly has mentioned in the past that enhancing the host experience is a concern, and the business has actually presented numerous functions over the last year.
Airbnb’s investor letter announcing its very first quarter financials– $1.5 billion in income and a $19 million net loss– likewise features an image of host Jason Burrell, who is “happy to display the creativity of other artists in his Airbnb.” That’s lovely– however it does not require to be in an incomes report about earnings, losses, profits, and performance projections.
Sonder’s first quarter profits announcement wasn’t as pitchy as Airbnb’s however it points out how the company has actually “meticulously studied each economic crisis as far back as the information goes,” and its 4th quarter monetary performance declaration consistently recommendations how the business is “revolutionizing” hospitality.
“Like prior generations,” Sonder specified in its fourth quarter investor letter, referring to Millennials and the Gen Z generation, “they requireuncompromising quality. Those desires are uniquely met by our international offering of wonderfully developed residential or commercial properties that provide mobile-first service and standard-driven quality.”
Sonder may one day put pressure on a sector of the hospitality market, however for now its stock is trading at $1.84 per share and its market cap is a non-unicorn-like $400 million regardless of bullish development projections for the remainder of the year.
Vacasa’s first quarter earnings statement included self-serving homages to the business from a vacation rental owner, and another one from a guest, but otherwise the shareholder letter was fairly fact-driven and numbers-oriented.
Meanwhile, the first quarter incomes statements from business such as Alphabet (Google), Booking Holdings, Expedia Group, and Tripadvisor essentially stuck to their monetary efficiency with a limited amount of puffery regardless whether it remained in the type of an investor letter or conventional quarterly press release.
Press reporters and investors want to get to the bottom line when studying companies’ revenues statements. Enough with the bullshit.
In Quick
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