1) Even a house full of bookings can’t prevent Wall Street from demanding a refund. Case in point: Airbnb stock dipped after the company reported bookings rose ~11% YoY. Packing 115m+ nights and experiences booked into Q2 sounds as good on paper as a four-star “Cozy Bungalow” — unless you’ve got Wall Street’s high expectations. In their case, Airbnb’s quarterly numbers sounded more like a glorified garden shed with a leaky faucet.
2) With today’s diners being as flaky as phyllo dough, restaurants are increasingly turning to reservation deposits that are applied to bills or refunded after meals. Per OpenTable data, 28% of Americans admitted to being no-shows at least once in 2021.
3) The hobby games segment (think: trading card games, board games, card and dice games, and role playing games) seems to be playing its cards right. A spike in popularity during the pandemic has held up nicely, with North American sales up 7% last year, reaching $2.89B in 2022. That’s up from $2.69B in 2021, $2.03B in 2020, and $1.68B in 2019.
4) Pixar’s Elemental began as a slow box office flicker but appears to have turned up the heat, clearing the $400m mark and becoming the first animated movie with original IP to do so since before covid. BTW, by “slow box office flicker,” we mean it opened to just $29.6m, the studio’s worst opening ever when adjusted for inflation.
