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Case Study

Airbnb’s disrupting power: Is Hilton the next Kodak?

By Stefan Michel, Elena Chabrier de Lassauniere, Maxim V. Lyadvinsky and Mario Mahmoud Majzoub

6 pages

December 2018

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Reference: IMD-7-2032

Hilton Inc. is one of the biggest players in the hospitality industry. It has a market capitalization of $20 billion which comes just after Marriott with a market capitalization of $34 billion. Just in recent years, peer-to-peer economy has emerged and imposed a threat to Hilton. This economy is based on a decentralized model whereby individuals interact to buy or sell goods and services directly with each other, without intermediation by a third-party. Among the biggest players in the peer to peer(sharing) economy is Airbnb, that was founded in 2008 and showed unprecedented growth until 2017. As a privately held start-up, Airbnb is valued at $30 billion, based on the company’s latest round of funding, serving over 3 million listings in more than 65,000 cities in close to 200 countries. Airbnb CEO has made it clear that their plan is to become a full-blown hospitality brand, one that delivers a seamless end to end experience to its customers. Meanwhile Hilton Inc. is reacting to the threat posed by Airbnb through denial. The CEO claims that Airbnb is not a threat to their value proposition. The case analyzes in which segment (leisure or business) Airbnb and Hilton inc. are winning or losing.

Learning Objective

At the conclusion of this case study, learners will be better able to conduct swot analysis and design strategy canvas based on information available in the case.
They will assess and learn how a company can be doing well in one business sector (like business sector) and suffer from competition in another (like leisure sector).
They will also learn how companies suffer from denial of competition, possibly to reduce their anxiety and ambiguity.

Keywords

Strategy, Competition, Disruption, Swot Analysis

Settings

World/global, United States of America
Hilton Worldwide, Airbnb, Travel and Leisure, Hospitality
2016-2017

Type

Published Sources

Available Languages

English

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