We’re seeing a shift from ownership to usership. How do you deal with this as an entrepreneur in the hospitality industry?

In the past, it took at least a decade to go from zero to a billion dollars of revenue. Now, some companies get this in barely a year. Take Airbnb for instance. It’s worth mentioning that Airbnb has never published any figures and yet their value has quadrupled since 2012. It is speculated that the company has 10 billion dollars in revenue.

New competitors

Airbnb and the traditional hotel chains see each other in court on a near daily basis. They clearly have yet to figure out how to deal with each other on the current playing field. The sharing economy opens up a whole new arena where the prosumers - consumers turned producers - will start to act. That means that the current out-of-home market will have new competitors. A new hybrid market is emerging, where private property is used for business purposes.

Micro-hotels and micro-restaurants

Thanks to new digital marketplaces, the consumer is becoming a producer (prosumer) and liabilities turn into assets. Countless of micro-hotels and micro-restaurants will be coming into existence. It is still unclear how these new markets can be regulated, but it is certain that they will blur the lines between different industries.

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