Is there enough room for another one-stop shop like Airbnb?

It's worth remembering that Airbnb was the feisty little upstart of the travel, tourism and hospitality industry not too long ago - before it became a power player.

Over the course of the last four years (some argue that it's since Chip Conley arrived at the company as its hospitality strategist in 2013), Airbnb has grown up... a lot.

The company could have carried on in its Silicon Valley-style bubble, being brash and ultra-confident, growing host and guest numbers to satisfy its investors.

A focus on growth of the core product may have worked for some time, given the still relatively youthful existence of home-sharing and private accommodation in the wider consumer marketplace and the many destinations (even countries) that Airbnb had yet to focus on.

Sure, Airbnb had faced (it still faces) difficulties with regulators in various cities - sometimes triggered by local authorities, often the work of lobbyists backed by the hotel sector.

But such hurdles had been overcome before and the tide was turning towards Airbnb and its ability to push the awareness of private accommodation into the mainstream.

The ire of regulators and commentators has cooled considerably in recent years, switching to constructive efforts to work with Airbnb rather than ban it outright - perhaps in response to realizing that private accommodation has become a genuine revenue-generator for destinations and something that waves of tourists are now considering.

Size and maturity have come to Airbnb, but 2018 has given the company something else.

The former-Amazon executive, who oversaw the rapid rise of Prime, joined Airbnb at the very moment that the company confirmed what many had expected feared/expected (depending on your point of view).

The first quarter of 2018 will probably go down as the most important period in Airbnb's history, as it unveiled a series of projects and products that have essentially pushed the company into vastly different markets compared to how it operated it before.

There are, of course, developments to how private accommodation is organized on the site (the Plus and Collections offshoots are good examples) and expansion of its Superhost program and introduction of the Superguest membership scheme.

But Airbnb wants to get to one billion guests per year by 2028 and it probably knows that this is not achievable through the core product alone.

Airbnb Experiences, the two-year-old platform (which is expanding) to connect guests to experiences and other in-destination products, is probably not the panacea to get Airbnb to the billion guest figure.

The opening up of the company's platform for hotel distribution is one of the big components behind Airbnb's ambitions, both from a numbers perspective and strategically.

In one move, Airbnb has gone up against the likes of Booking Holdings and Expedia Group with hotel bookings as well as private accommodation.

Some may argue that the giant online travel agencies have been competitors of Airbnb ever since they started concentrating heavily on private accommodation - but the very clear uptick in rhetoric against OTAs by CEO Brian Chesky only started following the hotel distribution announcement earlier this year.

Airbnb sees itself in the same world now - a one-stop shop (with the exception of transportation... for now) for travelers looking for somewhere to stay.

Other one-stop shoppers might have something to say about this...