The room letting website Airbnb is on the march to reach its goal of being the world’s largest hotelier.
The company, began in 2008, is in talks to raise money which would value the company at more than $10bn (£6bn).
Airbnb puts travellers in touch with owners who have rooms to rent, from the quirky to the sublime.
More than 11 million guests have stayed on Airbnb to date, and Airbnb now lists over 600,000 properties in over 35,000 cities. One million of these came from the UK and their top four destinations were Paris, New York, Barcelona and Amsterdam.
One of the founders, a computer science graduate, said last year: “InterContinental and Hilton have more than 650,000 rooms. We have 500,000, though they have a much higher occupancy rate.”
“We’ve been growing bookings and revenues two to three times every year and I would expect that to continue”, he added.
The idea came together when three you men were struggling to pay their rent. They decided to rent three airbeds on their living room floor during a San Francisco design conference which saw most of the city’s hotels being fully booked. The next day they created a website airbedandbreakfast.com, which later became Airbnb.
