Airbnb was a very effective arbitrage of short-term rental versus hotel law and tax gaps, but in their twilight phase it seems like they’ll increasingly resemble Distributed Flophouses Inc. until it’s impossible to distinguish them from any other discount hotel in their procedures, processes, and fees.

Though, now that I think about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if PayPal bought them in a couple years: the business is just another variation of flea market business model (such as eBay and Amazon Marketplace, but PayPal’s tolerance for liability and bad press is much higher than Amazon’s), and capturing that worldwide reservation revenue while outsourcing all of the actual hard work of physical operations (just as eBay does) would be an appropriate diversification.