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.
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).