As the millennial generation comes of age as business travelers, the hotel industry is gearing up new brands to attract them, featuring design-rich, high-tech lodgings—but it could prove challenging to win brand loyalty from a generation that began its travels by free CouchSurfing.

In 2015, Radisson will launch Radisson Red in the U.S., and plans to add 60 international hotels by 2020. Parent company Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group describes Radisson Red as a “lifestyle select” brand with appeal targeted at millennials born between 1980 and 2000, whom its managers expect to account for 50 percent of business-flight expenditures by 2020.

“It’s really to speak to a changing generation,” Thorsten Kirschke, President of the Americas for Carlson Rezidor, said at last month’s American Lodging Investment Summit in Los Angeles. “We don’t want to be perceived as a hotel company that has embraced the Baby Boomers at one point but forgotten to stay ahead of its time.”

Radisson Red’s design emphasizes big, bold graphics and art-filled public spaces that encourage interaction. The traditional hotel lobby has been replaced with a gallery where guests check in through a mobile application. Conceived as a “glocal concierge,” the Red app will let guests order drinks from the bar, food from the 24-hour deli, and cars for the airport. Visitors can even use the app to personalize the room, so the television screen displays their family photos when they arrive. If guests want livelier entertainment, they can watch movies on their room walls.

Some skeptics on Twitter critiqued Radisson Red’s in-your-face design as “cheesily renovated,” “confusing,” and fit for “serial killers.” Others tweeted their dismay at the brand’s high price of $300 a night for a New York room.

But Radisson Red’s website touts its brand as a “huge opportunity,” noting that its “attitudinal target audience” is now 100 million people, with U.S. millennials representing 21% of all spending. By 2030, the target audience should expand to 185 million, when U.S. millennials will outnumber non-millennials by 22 million.

Marriott International also seeks to win a piece of the millennial action, by importing a hotel brand into the North American market. AC Hotels by Marriott will launch in America’s top 15 travel markets, building on the success of their 79 properties in Europe. These trendy select-service hotels feature ultra-sleek design, a bistro and bar, and the inevitable “curated” art in the lobby.

Other entrants in the increasingly crowded field include Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide Inc.’s Aloft Hotels, where guests can use their mobile phones as virtual room keys, and Hyatt Hotels Corp.’s luxury-brand Andaz hotels. Hilton Worldwide Holdings is launching a new youth-oriented brand soon.

But winning over the millennials may take more than trendy art works in the lobby and the ability to check in via iPad. The first generation to grow up with the shared economy may prefer the personalized, peer-to-peer lodging offered by AirBnb.

Co-founded in 2008 by CEO Brian Chesky, Airbnb is “a community marketplace for people to list, discover and book unique accommodations around the world.” With 5 million guests accommodated in just the past nine months, Airbnb is now on track to overtake InterContinental Hotels Group and Hilton Worldwide as the world’s largest hotelier in 2015.

Airbnb’s chief technology officer Nathan Blecharczyk told the Sunday Telegraph: “InterContinental and Hilton have more than 650,000 rooms. We have 500,000, though they have a much higher occupancy rate.”

Chesky and two cash-strapped roommates conceived of Airbnb as a way to make quick money by renting out airbeds on the floor of their San Francisco apartment to attendees at a design conference. Now they’re on their way to becoming the first billionaires of the shared economy.

Airbnb acts as a broker. Guests pay a commission of 6 percent to 12 percent. And homeowners who list their property with Airbnb pay a 3 percent service fee for transactional costs and insurance coverage.

With over 150,000 guests staying in Airbnb properties every night, how much pain is the hotel industry feeling? A new study from Boston University School of Management took the first systematic look at the phenomenon, evaluating Airbnb’s impact in Texas. It found that every 1 percent increase in Airbnb bookings lowered hotel revenues by .05 percent. Luxury hotels were not significantly affected; hotels with little or no conference space took the biggest hit.

Adrian Segar, a business conference specialist, predicts that Airbnb’s impact will grow rapidly, as it becomes better known. “What happens as we pass the early adopter stage and move into a world where it’s easy and normal to stay in/rent out residential accommodations for short periods?” Segar wrote. Segar notes that business travelers may discover that they can save money by sharing Airbnb accommodations, and that Airbnb provides rooming options that are not available from traditional hotel accommodations.

Hotel consultant Vikram Singh also foresees Airbnb as a huge disrupter of the hotel industry. “People do not care as much as they used to about hotel brand when they plan their travel,” Singh wrote. “What they care about is a hotel’s location, value and reviews. Review websites like TripAdvisor have changed the game…” Singh believes that Airbnb is “spurning an army of independent hoteliers” who provide the “three things travelers are looking for—location, service and value.” Singh points out that that unlike brand hotels, Airbnb enables users to review their stay, giving traveler planners the “huge turn-on” of transparency.

With the millennials gearing up for decades of business travel, hotel brands have heavy work cut out for them to attract loyal young travelers. Carlson Rezidor says it will spend $140 million to roll out the Radisson Red brand, envisioning it as a “long-term play.”

But bricks-and-mortar hotel chains are playing on a different schedule than Airbnb, whose CEO Brian Chesky sent out this confident tweet on January 10, 2014: “Marriot wants to add 30,000 rooms this year. We will add that in the next 2 weeks.”