But AirBnb didn't "completely solve" the hotel industry, and hotels still exist. If anything, they seem to still basically be operating in the same space as they started: owner-based rentals, for both individual rooms and entire properties.
Well, one data point: Airbnb cheap rooms allowed me to travel widely while in my twenties. I definitely couldn’t have done so if I needed to pay for hotels. This very much changed the trajectory of my life.
That said, I was an active member of couchsurfing.org prior to Airbnb eating its lunch, so maybe you could make the argument that we’d be off better as a whole with a free community-oriented platform.
It disrupted it in the way of bringing new inventory online, and owning demand search for lodging while travelling, without owning any assets like hotels.
This pattern, of owning demand for food (instacart), transport (uber, etc), delivery (uber eats, etc) is a different model that doesn't own the assets outright and facilitates it instead.
