Following HomeAway's milestone of reaching one million properties last week, now it's the turn of Booking.com and Sabre to join in.
Priceline-owned Booking.com has been busily telling everyone this week that it has reached the milestone of 500,000 units of accommodation now available for consumers to search and book.
The addition of its 500,000th property is a bit of a PR wheeze, of course, naming the actual property in Berlin and giving it the chance to talk about the variety of properties available around the world (61,700 destinations in 201, if you're asking).
But a look behind this top-line figure is a more interesting exercise as it sheds a little bit of light what types of properties are ensuring Booking.com hits the figure - and perhaps why volume of accommodation is now the trumpet-blowing action of choice for both consumer and industry facing platforms.
The breakdown is as follows:
- Apartments - 99,082
- Country houses - 8,179
- Campgrounds - 1,456
- Villas - 61,168
- Inns - 7,457
- Roykans - 1,052
- Guesthouses - 47,258
- Farm stays - 5,268
- Riads - 1,036
- B&Bs - 31,734
- Lodges - 4,774
- Boats - 556
- Condo hotels - 16,536
- Resort villages - 3,854
- Luxury tents - 309
- Motels - 14,513
- Homestays - 2,514
- Love hotels - 176
- Resorts - 13,036
- Chalets - 2,291
- Capsule hotels - 70
- Hostels - 9,870
An official says the difference, some 332,000 properties, is the number of "standard" hotels on the system.
Either way, 500,000 properties is a sizeable number, yet remove the vacation rental-type units (apartments being the biggest for Booking.com) and there is still some way to go before the company reaches what many consider to be the approximate number of units of hotel-type accommodation available around the world - around 600,000 globally.
Nevertheless, Booking.com says it is committed to going beyond the 500,000 figure, covering all accommodation types ("at the best possible price point", of course).
But the recent volume-boasting (HomeAway's one million set a benchmark of sorts) perhaps illustrates that breadth of options for consumers remains a key motivator for marketing consumer facing brands.
A different tac is used by Airbnb, which doesn't disclose the exact number of properties on its system but said late-last year it had brokered some ten million stays in six years.
Such focus on volume is not exclusive to B2C platforms - land-grabbing hotel product is becoming commonplace for those behind the scenes, as Sabre also showed earlier this week.
Sabre has struck a deal with Expedia Affiliate Network, the white label service from Expedia Inc, to add "tens of thousands" of hotel properties into the Sabre GDS for agents to search and book on behalf of both leisure and corporate travellers.
Texas-based Sabre (which has a pretty friendly relationship with Expedia these days after offloading the operational elements of its Travelocity brand in August 2013) currently has around 125,000 properties on its system, so the addition of EAN's network of hotels could boost that number quite significantly.
An official says it will remove duplicates from EAN against its existing properties and no overall figure for what will eventually be made available is known as yet.
EAN is known to carry some 260,000+ hotels for its white label partners.
Amadeus claims to have some 300,000 properties available and Travelport CEO Gordon Wilson recently said its own Rooms & More agent platform had now hit the 580,000 property mark.