Airbnb managed to undercut a hotel industry that had been entrenched in global society for decades upon decades based on one simple principle: better lodgings at lower prices. That ethos still holds sway throughout much of Airbnb’s global operations, but for a few weeks in Rio, that book has been shotputted out of the window.
Bloomberg is reporting that, based on an index of Airbnb booking prices around the globe, lodgings in Rio de Janeiro have overtaken those in every other city around the globe. At around $206 per day on average, Rio’s Airbnb offerings are now ahead of Miami’s and San Francisco’s by a matter of dollars and ahead of Paris’ by more than $100.
“There’s a lot of demand, but there’s also a lot of supply,” Leonardo Tristao, head of Airbnb in Brazil, said in an interview with Bloomberg. “That helps guarantee that there’s a listing for any budget.”
That might be putting lipstick on an increasingly expensive pig. Bloomberg’s pricing index showed that the average traditional hotel in Rio runs about $242 per night. That puts the Airbnb discount at about 15 percent — about half as much as San Francisco and Paris, a fourth as much as Tokyo and less than a fifth of the discount if one books in Mexico City.
In fact, Rio was one of three notable cities — alongside Lagos, Nigeria, and Accra, Ghana — in which the average Airbnb rates exceeded the daily per capita gross domestic product of each respective country.
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