After entering China for more than 6 years, on the morning of May 24, Airbnb China announced that starting from July 30, 2022, it will completely remove the listing and experience business in China, and only retain the outbound tourism business.

The decline of Airbnb in China is not just because of the epidemic. The main problem is that it is not acclimatized to the local environment and is not localized enough.

Airbnb mainly focuses on the C2C model, where hosts and guests are directly connected, and Airbnb only acts as an intermediary; while domestic platforms such as Tujia focus on the B2C model, renting other people’s houses and renting them out to the tenants again.

The hidden danger of the C2C model is that Airbnb’s profits mainly come from intermediary fees, and the platform rarely intervenes too much in various links before and after check-in, and it is difficult to have actual binding force on landlords and tenants.

The underlying service chain of Airbnb in China has not been well established. In contrast, Tujia, Xiaozhu, etc. will provide landlords with standardized services similar to apartments and hotels, such as room cleaning and washing.

In the past 10 years, after compiling the short-term rental business of Ant Short-Term Rental, Ctrip, Qunar and other platforms in 2016, Tujia has gained an absolute advantage in terms of housing resources.

By December 2020, Tujia's domestic online listings had exceeded 2.3 million units, there are only about 500,000 domestic listings on Airbnb. In addition, the popularity of Airbnb in China is not as good as that of Meituan B&B. The latter, as a super-app, often has much lower customer acquisition costs than the former.

While Airbnb has been popular with Chinese tourists heading overseas, domestic tourists tend to prefer local Chinese companies.

Li Qingyuan, a Zhihu user, pointed out, "Airbnb is still biased towards foreign thinking, mainly for students and mid-to-high-end users. But those who book homestays on Meituan and Tujia are a large group of ordinary people, in addition to the mid-to-high-end users.”