For vacation rentals, I have had the owner give me their card afterwards.
For food delivery (at least takeout) and ride share, the app actually provides a real value; it handles matching drivers and customers who want to make a deal now, for a service that is not really super differentiated. It makes sense to stay in their ecosystem and it seems fair that they would be continuing to make a profit.
> For food delivery (at least takeout) and ride share, the app actually provides a real value
The problem with a food delivery network is that it should be a dumb network, not a big profit center. It should be like an ISP, with the food being the high value packets being delivered to you.
If you look at pre-UberEats times, each restaurant employed a couple of delivery drivers on scooters. Some might have shared those if the restaurants were on the same street, but that's about it.
During low times these drivers would laze around doing nothing, effectively wasting productivity, whereas during peak times, the restaurant didn't have enough drivers.
Having one delivery driver network for an entire city should have made things more efficient and cheaper. But because for example in Europe, JustEat-TakeAway and UberEats have inserted themselves as the middleman and crushed out all competition. Delivery has gotten more expensive and inconvenient because of it.
These days delivery costs €3-5 and there is a €15 delivery minimum. Before, no delivery charge and there was no official minimum. One time one of my friends order a 6-pack of cola, although I doubt they would have delivered that to the edge of the city.
Worst of it is, restaurants are not allowed to charge lower prices themselves than they offer on the app. On top of that, JustEat-TakeAway will make a branded store site on restaurantname.localdeliverycompany.com, of which they get a cut versus if you used the restaurant's own site.
If delivery is more expensive, more inconvenient and often slower now than before 2015, what 'real value' was added?
In the US, delivery was pretty spotty in the pre-app days (pizza places tended to have it almost always, other restaurants were case-by-case). The idea of more community organized joint delivery services is really interesting, it just didn’t exist anywhere I lived in the pre-app-days (maybe it was a thing in major cities, that wouldn’t surprise me).
I wonder why the apps out-competed it. Delivery apps are often not even supported officially by the restaurants, right? It’s just sort of like—if somebody comes in for the pickup and gives the right name, they don’t typically care and will just give the delivery guy your order. So it isn’t like some vendor lock-in thing, seems just like network effect from the users or something…
Sure because you had to distribute sales and place product. You shifted marketing off to the retail location and distributor and you still controlled the price / mark up.
Pizza is already sold, the last mile delivery should have zero impact on its retail. Right now the last mile delivery has a near monopoly on retail of a restaurant. Pretending that toast/grubhub/seamless somehow benefit the customer is pure rubbish.
>> If you look at pre-UberEats times, each restaurant employed a couple of delivery drivers on scooters.
> This was not my experience. Hardly any restaurants had delivery other than pizza.
Your parent commenter appears to be European. Europe enjoys better city living in many ways than the United States does because the US is relatively underpopulated. (On the other hand, urban Americans have much larger homes.)
I live in Netherland, and here UberEats was a latecomer to what Thuisbezorgd had been doing for ages, but other than that it rings true. Before Thuisbezorgd, it was mostly just pizza that got delivered. Maybe also other Italian food, and maybe a little bit of Asian. Since Thuisbezorgd we can get any cuisine you can imagine delivered to your door.
But the standard Dutch takeaway food has always been Chinese (Dutch Chinese-Indonesian, actually), and I think even now that might still be more takeaway than delivery.
> Before Thuisbezorgd, it was mostly just pizza that got delivered. Maybe also other Italian food, and maybe a little bit of Asian.
> But the standard Dutch takeaway food has always been Chinese (Dutch Chinese-Indonesian, actually),
Well, those and things like spareribs, burgers, kapsalon, etc., which makes it a rather broad spectrum of takeaways that already had delivery.
In case you didn't know, Takeaway = Thuisbezorgd (or rather, the other way around). And in the 2010s, Thuisbezorgd and Just Eat had a pretty active fight for marketshare, until they decided the most profitable course of action was for Just Eat to operate in the countries where it held a majority marketshare, and Takeaway to do likewise, creating regional monopolies. Later on they merged, which any sane regulatory agency would have blocked.
What is interesting is that UberEats hasn't tried to compete on price at all. They charge similar, semi-extortionate prices. They just offer delivery from more and more upscale places.
Anecdotal but I have found that at least some times, rideshare drivers are willing to take cash for rides under some circumstances. Not at all common though, most of the time I have asked I’ve been unceremoniously shot down. The one time I distinctly remember it working out was during a packed event in Vegas (EDC LV, music festival). I just asked if they were going to be driving for the concert the second day, since it was so ridiculously packed and hectic to get a ride the first day, and they said yes and I just offered $100 for the ride tomorrow (I was already paying that much with uber, but with poor service from the app and many cancelled drivers). They agreed, they got a double-rate fare for one unsanctioned ride, I got better service since they were better incentivized to get my ride done, and overall everyone was happy. Except Uber I guess. YMMV
I'd like to say I feel a lot better about having AirBnB help handle any problems or disputes that makes it worth paying some overhead... but it's really the other way around.
>I usually find the place I'd like to stay on AirBnB and then google the title & description and the property management website usually pops up.
Maybe it's selection bias but 80%+ of the airbnbs I stay at are mom and pop establishments with 0-2 other properties listed on their profile. I doubt they have enough scale to bother set up a separate booking website for their properties. That said I have noticed hotels advertising on airbnb, but they represent a small fraction (ie. <10%) of listings that I see.
> For vacation rentals, I have had the owner give me their card afterwards.
This simply doesn't work.
I'm half a century old, go on vacation several times each year, and it happened only once in my lifetime that I wanted to go to the same rental as before. I pulled the card from the owner, called him, and found out that it's not free at the time I can go there.
I also don't know anyone who was in the same rental more than once.
So yes, Booking, Check24 and similar always take their cut in my case.
I do have some relatives that like to rent the same place year-after-year for family events, for whatever reason. They are a little picky so I think they just like to go back to a place if it worked out. I’m actually not sure if they go through apps at this point, or what…
My family and friends (sometimes up to 5 families together) have gone to the same summer beach rental for more than 25 years. I know dozens of families who do the same thing. I have several large groups of friends from college who have rented the same mountain places since we graduated (we are almost 2 decades older than you).
Once again, "I don't do that" is not the same as "no one does that".
The app is also providing real value for maids; the point of consulting a trusted maid registry is to hire a maid who won't steal everything in your house.
That value doesn't persist over time because you already know the maid. So there's an expectation that you make a direct arrangement with her.
For food delivery (at least takeout) and ride share, the app actually provides a real value; it handles matching drivers and customers who want to make a deal now, for a service that is not really super differentiated. It makes sense to stay in their ecosystem and it seems fair that they would be continuing to make a profit.