I'm a little confused. If HouseTrip only deals with the rentals of entire homes, as opposed to people being able to rent out spare rooms...and the pricing is competitive...how could this model compete with airbnb on volume?
A quick search of their listings shows that HouseTrip has less than 3000 Paris options compared to Airbnb's 10,000+.
OF course, that doesn't account for quality. When I was looking for Italian rooms on airbnb, there were numerous generic entries by professional bed&breakfast operators...it was something similar to what you see overrunning Craigslist's apartment listing these days.
However, I'm not sure that the number of lower-quality entries is enough to offset airbnb's advantage. After all, what sets airbnb apart from craigslist is the ability to easily filter by recommendation/quality, thanks to the underlying social network.
It's possible that a native startup can beat back an American juggernaut...but when has that happened? I can think of Groupon in China and, well, Facebook and Twitter in China. I know there are such cases in Europe that have slipped my mind...but AFAIK, all of them involved European-to-European transactions (just as China's groupon clones are Chinese-to-Chinese transactions)...I know a lot of Europeans travel but I imagine the market to capture is still America-to-Europe type visitors, and Airbnb will seemingly always have that advantage.
So again the numbers in HouseTrip's niche seems to be this:
Supply: The number of people who can rent out their entire home
Demand: The number of people who can afford to rent out an entire home (and then, the subset of those who would rather just get a more centrally-located hotel room instead).
Why do you assume that America-to-Europe visitors are the market to capture? Europeans have (typically) more vacation time than Americans, and travel around Europe is pretty easy. Tourism within Europe is a very big market. I don't have figures to hand, but I'd think that it is bigger than America-to-Europe visitors.
