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Uber is transactional; Airbnb is humanity.
—ELISA SCHREIBER, Greylock Partners
THE FORMATION AND GROWTH of Airbnb the company is an entrepreneurial saga for the ages. The struggle the founders faced to get it off the ground, the technology, product, and culture they built, and the way it swiftly became a high-performing growth machine make up a tale of surprising corporate agility. That they did it all within just a matter of a few years, with little prior experience, is striking.
But to study only what happens within the four walls of the company itself would be to miss almost the entire “story” of Airbnb. Airbnb—the company—is those 2,500 or so people, mostly in San Francisco. Airbnb—the movement—is millions of people on the ground, everywhere.
Many millions of people have used an Airbnb. Its business is seasonal, but the company hit a new nightly peak during the summer of 2016, when 1.8 million people were staying on Airbnb-procured accommodations in a single night. Yet even with those numbers, the company’s penetration is still low: many people still haven’t heard of it at all, and when you mention the concept to them, it still sounds just as bizarre as it sounded to the first few investors who wouldn’t touch it.
Many people I brought it up to over the course of reporting this book recoiled when I mentioned the idea. For some of them, there’s an “ew” factor. “I would never do that,” says one friend of a friend. “What if you end up on someone’s dirty sheets?” The reaction of a driver hired by a major morning news show to pick me up and take me to the studio one morning was typical. He hadn’t heard of it, but after I explained the idea, he shook his head and said he would simply never do it. First, he said, this is exactly how you spread bedbugs. Plus, he pointed out, if you open your doors to strangers, you have no idea whom you’re letting in your home: “You could have a killer on the loose!” He’s right. You could. Plenty of things did go wrong: There was the EJ situation, of course, and more bad incidents to come. But any study of the Airbnb phenomenon has to first look at the need it identified and the hole it has filled. Because you don’t get to millions and millions of customers without, as Y Combinator’s Paul Graham would say, making something people want.
In Airbnb’s first few years, it had a reputation for being a website where millennials went for cheap options and stayed in someone’s living room or in a spare bedroom. But over time, it evolved. If there were three phases of Airbnb, they could be very loosely categorized as the couch-surfing phase of the very early days; the igloo-and-castle phase, when the growth started to take off and the company became known for all the odd, quirky, get-a-load-of-this spaces; and the Gwyneth Paltrow phase, when its user base and inventory had expanded to such a degree that the actress spent a vacation in January 2016 at an $8,000-per-night Airbnb listing in Punta Mita, Mexico, and then returned a few months later to book a villa on the Cote d’Azur for $10,000 per night. The significance of the Paltrow phase was twofold: first, that Airbnb had become a legitimate option for the pickiest, most sophisticated of travelers, and, second, that it had become so large a platform that it basically had something for everyone.
Today the scope of Airbnb’s inventory reflects the diversity in the world’s housing market. Its three million listings are all unique, and the range of properties and experiences available is hard to imagine. You can pay $20 to sleep on an air mattress blown up in someone’s kitchen, or you can pay tens of thousands per week for a villa in Mexico like Paltrow’s. On a recent day, the options in New York ranged from $64 a night for a basement apartment in Jamaica, Queens, to $3,711 for a five-story townhouse on East Tenth Street. In Paris, $24 would have scored you a room with a twin bed and a washbasin in the southwestern suburb of Fontenay-aux-Roses, but lay down $8,956 and you could have spent the night in a triplex apartment in the Sixteenth Arrondissement with a private garden facing the Eiffel Tower and “VIP hotel services.”
The breadth and whimsy of the options offered makes scrolling through Airbnb’s listings an exercise in escapism. There are almost three thousand castles on the site, like the Château de Barnay in Burgundy, France, or the medieval fortress in Galway where travelers sleep in the turret. There are scores of windmills and houseboats. There are hundreds of treehouses, and they are some of the most popular listings on the site: the most “wish-listed” property is a series of three rooms suspended in the treetops of a woodsy neighborhood in Atlanta, connected by rope bridges and draped in twinkly lights. The most popular listing is the Mushroom Dome, a rustic geodesic dome cabin in Aptos, California, that has five stars and more than nine hundred reviews and books up to six months in advance. Says Reid Hoffman, “If I were giving advice to someone, I would say give serious thought to building a nice treehouse. They have waiting lists for months.” Other listings include horse ranches, retro trailers, shipping containers, wagons, yurts, and buses, like the one located in a vegetarian community in Sweden (house rules: “We appreciate that you do not eat or bring meat to the bus”). There are one hundred lighthouses.
Over time, Airbnb started to assume a place in the cultural conversation: during the 2016 presidential election, The New Yorker ran a humor piece listing Airbnb customer reviews of the candidates. “During the 2000 race between Al Gore and George W. Bush, the question of the day was: who would you rather have a beer with?” the spoof read. “In the 2016 primary season, it’s: who would you rather rent your home to on Airbnb?” Companies started using Airbnb as a marketing platform, creating specially themed listings around their brands: in the summer of 2016, pegged to the release of the movie Finding Dory, Pixar listed a night on a chic floating raft in the Great Barrier Reef designed to bring winners as close as possible to the natural habitat of Dory and Nemo.
Of course, not everyone wants to stay on a raft or be suspended in the trees (the Aptos geodesic dome has a composting toilet, so you have to throw your toilet paper in the garbage), or even sleep in the turret of a fifteenth-century castle. If anything, the more fanciful listings may serve more as image boosters, fodder for an endless stream of Airbnb-friendly news stories like “18 Fairytale Airbnb Castles That’ll Make Your Dreams Come True.”
The vast majority of the listings are more utilitarian. They are all over the map, both literally—only a quarter of Airbnb’s business is in the United States—and figuratively, coming in every size, shape, price point, and level of host interaction. You can stay in someone’s home that is excessively personalized, with all their trinkets, books, and bathroom products, or you can choose one that looks much more like a modern minimalist hotel room. You can stay while the host is on the premises, you can have the full place to yourself, or you can choose a situation that falls somewhere in between, like a guest cottage where the owner lives full-time in the main house or an in-law suite with a separate entrance. The level of interaction with the host can be zero, or it can be over the top; some hosts make dinner for their guests and, of course, breakfast (the hosts of a thatched cottage in the countryside of Salisbury, England, for instance, offer both a full English breakfast in their kitchen or the option of having a basket of home-baked pastries and jam delivered to the door of the upstairs suite they rent out).
“It’s Anticommodity”
Exactly why Airbnb has caught on in the way it has is due to a combination of factors. A big one is price. The company was formed in the depths of the Great Recession, in 2008, and while listings run the gamut, by and large they are usually a lot cheaper than staying in a standard hotel. One of the most truly disruptive things about Airbnb is that you can now find a simple place to stay in New York City for under one hundred dollars per night.
The other reasons are less tangible but arguably even more important. Part of Airbnb’s success is that it tapped into a dissatisfaction with the mass commodification of large-scale hotel chains. Even the hotel companies recognize this. “Twenty years ago when you listened to what travelers wanted, they wanted a clean room and not to be surprised,” Arne Sorenson, CEO of Marriott International, explained in an onstage interview about disruption at the American Magazine Media Conference in early 2016. “That fed our brand’s strategy: OK, let’s make sure it all looks similar.” Now, he says, what the traveler wants has changed: “If I’m waking up in Cairo, I want to know I’m in Cairo. I don’t want to wake up in a room that looks like a room in Cleveland.”
Much in the same way we now want homespun, small-batch artisanal everything—from bread to pickles to cocktail ice—many travelers, and especially millennial travelers, want the same kind of imperfect authenticity from their travel experiences. That could mean staying with a retiree who likes the company, or having a chic Soho loft all to yourself that you have to find through a back entrance off a side street. It could be opting for a room in a Craftsman tucked away in the hills of Los Angeles’s Silver Lake that comes with access to a sunny private garden. Whatever form it takes, it’s something that’s different, real, and unique. It’s making travel excessively personal when it had become impersonal. “It’s anticommodity,” says Greylock’s Reid Hoffman. “It’s uniqueness. It’s humanization.”
Just as disruptive as the spaces themselves is the option Airbnb gives travelers to stay outside the main hotel and tourism districts and within corners and crevices of cities they don’t typically get to see. This is a big marketing hook for Airbnb, and it’s a smart one: hotels in big cities are often centralized to the commercial zones. The ability to stay on a tree-lined block in brownstone Brooklyn or a newly surfacing residential neighborhood in Prague is a novel concept and, for many travelers, is more desirable. And while this experience has always been possible on sites like Craigslist or through classified ads or local messaging boards, Airbnb ripped the market open; put it on an accessible, fast, user-friendly platform; and drew millions to it. So it became both acceptable, since millions of people were using it, and desirable, since it was populated with all that growing and beautifully photographed inventory.
I think of my own experience traveling recently to Washington, D.C. I love nice hotels, and once a year, thanks to the grace of corporate negotiated rates, I get to stay at the Four Seasons in Georgetown, one of my favorite hotels in what I truly believe is one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in America. In the spring of 2016, I decided to try Airbnb instead, and booked a hundred-year-old carriage house with a landscaped garden tucked behind a townhouse and down a narrow stone alleyway in the neighborhood’s historic residential section. It was less than a mile away from the Four Seasons but deep inside a neighborhood I wouldn’t have otherwise ventured into. I still love the Four Seasons Georgetown, and this same example also serves as a reminder of what hotels offer that Airbnb doesn’t (the cable went out during a rainstorm). But it also demonstrates why Airbnb is so disruptive. It’s less commodified, more unique. It’s less about the big avenues and wide arterial roads and the commercial zones where the hotels are often located, and more about the parts of the city reserved for the people who live there. It’s about, as Airbnb would later promote, experiencing a place like a local rather than as a tourist. And while that’s not always right for everyone—and that very aspect of it can have plenty of consequences on those who live in those quiet residential neighborhoods, a phenomenon we’ll explore later—there are a whole lot of people who prefer to see the world in this way. On a subsequent to Washington, D.C., I returned to that listing.
A Logo, a Rebrand, a Mission
Sometime in 2013, Airbnb started thinking about reorienting its entire mission and center of gravity to better articulate the elements that made using its platform so unique. In a process led by Douglas Atkin, the company’s global head of community who’d joined earlier that year, it had come to focus these aspects around a single idea, the notion of “belonging.” Atkin, an expert on the relationship between consumers and brands and author of the book The Culting of Brands, had come to the idea after months of intense focus groups with some five hundred members of Airbnb’s user base all around the world, and by mid-2014 the company had settled on an entire repositioning around this concept. Airbnb had a new mission statement: to make people around the world feel like they could “belong anywhere.” It had a new color: magenta. And it had a new logo to symbolize this: a cute, squiggly little shape that was the result of months of conceiving and refining that it called the “Bélo.” It had been named by the company’s new chief marketing officer, Jonathan Mildenhall, who’d recently joined from Coca-Cola. Mildenhall also convinced the founders to expand “belong anywhere” from an internal mission statement to the company’s official tagline.
In July 2014, the company introduced the rebrand, as well as an attendant redesign of its mobile app and website, in a big launch event at its headquarters. Chesky introduced the concept in a cerebral, high-minded essay on Airbnb’s website: A long time ago, he wrote, cities used to be villages. But as mass production and industrialization came along, that personal feeling was replaced by “mass-produced and impersonal travel experiences,” and along the way, “people stopped trusting each other.” Airbnb, he wrote, would stand for something much bigger than travel; it would stand for community and relationships and using technology for the purpose of bringing people together. Airbnb would be the one place people could go to meet the “universal human yearning to belong.” The Bélo itself was carefully conceived to resemble a heart, a location pin, and the “A” in Airbnb. It was designed to be simple, so that anyone could draw it; rather than protect it with lawyers and trademarks, the company invited people to draw their own versions of the logo—which, it was announced, would stand for four things: people, places, love, and Airbnb.
To say Airbnb can be idealistic at times is an understatement, and while its customers seemed to embrace the concept, the media were more skeptical. TechCrunch called “Belong anywhere” a “hippy-dippy concept,” while others wondered whether it was really warm and fuzzy “belonging” that drove people to Airbnb or whether they just wanted a cheap and cool place to stay. And as soon as it launched, media outlets lampooned the Bélo, not for its idealism so much as for its shape, which they said looked alternately like breasts, buttocks, and both male and female genitalia all at once. Within twenty-four hours the sexual interpretations of the logo had been curated and posted on a Tumblr blog. “Nothing says temporary home like the vagina-butt-uterus abstraction that Airbnb chose as its new logo,” tweeted Katie Benner of the New York Times.
I, too, remember being highly skeptical—not of the logo but of the “belonging” concept upon first hearing about it. I thought it meant spending time with the person who lived in the space you rented. In the few times I had used Airbnb, I definitely hadn’t met or seen my host and didn’t want to; I mainly wanted to save money.
But “belonging” in the Airbnb-rebrand context didn’t have to be about having tea and cookies with the person who lives in the space you rent. It was much broader: it meant venturing into neighborhoods that you might not otherwise be able to see, staying in neighborhoods and places as a traveler you wouldn’t normally be able to, bunking in someone else’s space, and having an experience that person “hosted” for you, regardless of whether you ever laid eyes on him or her. A few months after my spring 2016 trip to Georgetown, when I booked a place through Airbnb in Philadelphia during the Democratic National Convention, I warily pushed open the door to an apartment in a run-down walk-up in Rittenhouse Square to find an inviting studio with high ceilings; huge, heavy doors; walls lined with books; cozy, minimalist decor; and a string of twinkly lights hanging over the fireplace. I liked everything about “Jen’s” place, from her book collection, which mirrored mine, to the towels she’d fluffed and folded, to the handwritten card she left for me. (It helped that Jen and I had the same aesthetic taste, but then that’s precisely why I picked her listing.)
“When you stay in an Airbnb, even if the host isn’t there, it’s personal,” says NYU’s Arun Sundararajan. “It’s intimate. There’s this connection that you have with this person, with their art, with their choice of linens, with their wedding pictures. And that evokes in us a sense of something that we have lost.”
Whatever the press thought of the rebrand, Airbnb’s users seemed to “get” it—over the next few months, more than eighty thousand people went online and designed their own versions of the logo, a rate of consumer-brand engagement that would be considered off the charts by larger brands. (Airbnb even embraced the hubbub around the logo. Douglas Atkin, who spearheaded the journey to “belonging,” later referred to it as “equal-opportunity genitalia.”)
By this point, the company’s user base had also evolved. While Airbnb’s first adapters were cash-strapped millennials looking for a good deal, its demographics started to broaden. Millennials are still the company’s core—they are the ones most likely to use the term as a verb, as in “I’ll be able to go to Coachella after all—I’ll just Airbnb” (the translation being that cost isn’t an impediment; they will find a way to be there). But the company’s user base has fanned out as it has matured. The average age of a guest is thirty-five; a third are over the age of forty. The average age of a host is forty-three, but those over sixty are the company’s fastest-growing host demographic.
These days, Airbnb users are just as likely to be people like Sheila Riordan, fifty-five, a marketing and client-services manager and founder of cmonletstravel.com, a service that plans unique travel itineraries, who lives with her husband and three children in Alpharetta, Georgia. In 2013, Riordan had a business trip to London and was planning to bring her husband and eleven-year-old son with her, but she waited too long to book a hotel, and by the time she tried, even the Holiday Inn Express was $600 a night. So she tried Airbnb instead, renting the apartment of a woman who lived across the Thames for around $100 per night. Riordan’s husband was reluctant—“He loves his American bathrooms,” she says—but the space was charming and fit all of them and was a bargain relative to the city’s hotels.
Not too long after that, Riordan took her eighteen-year-old daughter to Paris and Amsterdam and used Airbnb. In Paris, they rented a studio on the Left Bank that was “nothing fancy,” but it was a nice building in a nice neighborhood, with double doors that opened out onto a view of a patio garden below. In Amsterdam, they stayed in an apartment between two canals ten steps from the Anne Frank House. The homes had their quirks—the apartment of their Paris host, Ahmed, featured an 18 x 24 portrait of himself with his mother over the bed—but they loved it. “It makes the trip more interesting,” she says. Back home in Alpharetta—a conventional suburb characterized by culs-de-sac and spacious, similar-looking homes—many in her circle think she’s crazy. “They say to me, ‘You’re so daring.’ They want to come home to the air-conditioned Hilton. I would much rather come home and sit in the garden with the host, who can tell us the best places to go in town.”
The Super-Users
The company’s most hardcore users are a small subgroup of people who choose to live full-time on Airbnb rentals, nomadic globetrotters who migrate from one listing to another. A few years ago, when David Roberts and his wife, Elaine Kuok, relocated to New York City from Bangkok (Kuok is an artist, Roberts is a documentary filmmaker and former academic physicist), they decided to live in a different neighborhood, one month at a time, using Airbnb.
Their story gained attention after they were featured in the press, but in fact it’s becoming a trend. TechCrunch labeled this phenomenon the “rise of the hipster nomad” in an article penned by Prerna Gupta, an entrepreneur who, with her husband, opted out of the Silicon Valley rat race to wander the globe. They got rid of most of their things, put the rest in storage, and spent much of 2014 living for weeks or months at a time in Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador, Switzerland, Sri Lanka, India, and Crete.
Kevin Lynch, a creative director for an ad agency, moved to Shanghai from Chicago with his wife and daughter four years ago. When his company asked him to assume responsibility for the Hong Kong market as well, instead of renting an apartment for his trips there and settling into what he calls the “expat bubble,” he decided to sample his way through the city on Airbnb. He’s stayed in more than 136 different listings so far and says the ability to constantly seek out new, unfamiliar environments let him tap into an “explorer” mind-set. “I believe the better you know a place, the less you notice it,” he says.
None of these “hipster nomads” can really compare with Michael and Debbie Campbell, a retired couple from Seattle who in 2013 packed up their belongings, put everything that didn’t fit into two suitcases into a storage unit, rented out their townhouse, and “retired” to Europe, where they have lived almost exclusively on Airbnb for the past four years. As of the fall of 2016, they had stayed at a total of 125 listings in fifty-six countries. They spent months plotting everything out before making the decision, but doing the math, they realized that if they kept their costs in check, they could essentially “live” on Airbnb for the same amount of money it would cost them to live in Seattle.
To make it work, the Campbells—Michael is seventy-one, and Debbie is sixty—are frugal and meticulous about what they spend. Their nightly budget is ninety dollars, though they will go above that in cities that are more expensive, like Jerusalem, and make up for it in, say, Bulgaria or Moldova. They eat almost every meal at home and keep up the same rituals they’d have if they were still living in Seattle, like playing Scrabble or dominoes after dinner. So when they hunt for listings, they look for a big dining-room table, a well-equipped kitchen, and good Wi-Fi. They rent a full apartment or a home rather than a room in a home, but they almost always stay in places where the host will greet them. Their average stay is nine days; they book three to four weeks ahead of time; and they often ask for discounts, but nothing too extreme and only because they are militant about staying on their budget: spending 20 percent more than you’d planned when you’re on a two-week vacation is one thing, but do it for 365 nights and, as Michael points out, “there goes your nest egg. We’re not on vacation,” he says. “We’re just living our daily lives, in other people’s homes.”
The Campbells have made lots of friends along the way, including their host in Madrid who took their Christmas-card photo; the host in Cyprus who gave them a walking tour of Nicosia and helped them through the checkpoint; and Vassili, the host in Athens who served them a Greek barbecue and took Michael with him to a World Cup–qualifying soccer match, speeding to the stadium together on the back of Vassili’s motorcycle.
In the summer of 2015, the Campbells sold their home in Seattle officially. They know their Airbnb global approach is not for everyone, and they’re not sure how long they’ll continue, but they have no plans to stop. As Michael said in an onstage talk the couple were invited to give at the 2015 Airbnb Open, “We’re not rich, but we’re comfortable, we’re lifelong learners, we’re healthy, and we’re curious.” They chronicle their adventures at seniornomads.com.
They seem to have struck a chord: A New York Times article on the Campbells was among the paper’s most e-mailed articles that week; after it ran, they heard from lots of people in their age group whose adult children had encouraged them to try it out. The Campbells’ oldest son and his family decided to follow in their footsteps: he and his wife pulled their two kids out of school for a year and took a year off themselves to travel around the world. They called themselves the “junior nomads.”
Getting the Most out of Hosts
The key to all of this, of course, to the entire Airbnb ecosystem and to the company itself, is the people who deliver the inventory: the hosts. The platform offers a place for travelers to stay in other people’s homes or apartments, but without those residences there simply is no company; there is no Airbnb. It’s a hefty ask: city by city, getting millions of real people to agree to open up their most personal spaces to strangers and effectively to become citizen hoteliers.
And it’s not enough just to get the hosts to sign on and to offer their spaces; Airbnb has to get them to work hard to offer a good experience. The sheer number of listings makes the company the world’s biggest provider of accommodations, but it neither owns nor controls any of the inventory it offers, or the behavior of any of the people offering it.
The founders knew this from the earliest days, when convincing people to list their spaces was one of their first struggles. But it wasn’t until late 2012, when Chesky read an issue of Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, the journal of the esteemed Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, that he started thinking more seriously about the actual experience the company was offering. He decided they needed to transform Airbnb more deeply from a tech company into a hospitality company.
Shortly after that, Chesky read the book Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow. The book’s author was Chip Conley, the founder of the Joie de Vivre boutique hotel chain, which he started in San Francisco in 1987. He grew it to thirty-eight boutique hotels, mostly in California, and then sold a majority stake in 2010. Over time, Conley himself had become something of a guru. In Peak, he explained how he had saved his company in the wake of 9/11 and the dot-com bust by applying the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—the pyramid of physical and psychological needs humans must have met in order to achieve their full potential, with food and water at the bottom and self-actualization at the top—to corporate and individual transformation. Chesky saw in Conley’s writing both business and hotel-industry savvy and perhaps a kindred spirit of idealism (Conley talked about wanting his hotel guests to check out three days later as a “better version of themselves”). He asked Conley if he would come to Airbnb to give a talk to his employees about hospitality.
After Conley’s talk, Chesky made a pitch: he wanted Conley to come on board full-time in a major executive role to lead the company’s hospitality efforts. Conley, who was newly retired at fifty-two, was reluctant to sign on. But after talking with John Donahoe, then the CEO of eBay, who was a friend of Conley’s and a mentor to Chesky, Conley agreed to sign on as a consultant: he told Chesky he had enough time to contribute eight hours a week to Airbnb.
Over dinner the night before he was to start, Chesky convinced Conley to double his time to fifteen hours a week. That plan, too, soon went out the window. “Within a few weeks it was, like, ‘Oh, this is more like fifteen hours a day,’” Conley recalls. In the fall of 2013, he joined full-time as head of hospitality and strategy. He says he ultimately took the role because he was fascinated by the challenge of effectively democratizing hospitality. “How do you take hospitality, which in many ways had gotten very corporatized, and take it back to its roots?”
Conley went to work right away, trying to help bring organization and know-how to Airbnb’s host community. He traveled to twenty-five cities giving talks and hosting tips to help regular apartment-dwellers channel their inner innkeeper. He set up a centralized hospitality-education effort, created a set of standards, and started a blog, a newsletter, and an online community center where hosts could learn and share best practices. He developed a mentorship program wherein experienced hosts could help bring new hosts on board and show them the ropes to good hospitality.
Among the tips, rules, and suggestions that are now articulated in Airbnb’s materials: Try to respond to booking queries within twenty-four hours. Before accepting a guest, try to make sure their idea for their trip matches your “hosting style”; for example, if someone’s looking for a hands-on host and you’re private, it may not be the best match. Communicate often, and provide detailed directions. Establish any “house rules” very clearly (if you’d like travelers to take their shoes off, or not use the backyard, or not smoke or stay away from the computer). Clean every room thoroughly, especially the bathroom and kitchen. Bedding and towels should be fresh. Want to go beyond the basics? Consider picking up travelers at the airport, leaving a welcome note, sprucing up the room with fresh flowers, or providing a treat upon check-in, like a glass of wine or a welcome basket. Do these things, he says, even if you’re not present during the stay.
Conley and the hospitality team can, of course, only suggest or encourage hosts to do these things; they can’t require it. This is where Airbnb’s review system kicks in, the company’s two-way rating mechanism that prompts both hosts and guests to review one another after a stay. The blind reputation assessments have become a vital element of the Airbnb ecosystem: they provide a layer of third-party validation for both the host and the guest, and with both parties looking to bolster their reputations for future use within the system, the incentive to review is mutual and engagement is high: more than 70 percent of Airbnb stays are reviewed, and while there is some “grade inflation,” it helps keep both parties in check. The system has additional value for Airbnb: it is used as a lever to encourage and to reward good host behavior and to discourage bad behavior.
Early on, the founders learned that they were in possession of a valuable currency: the ability to determine where a host’s listing would show up in search rankings. That ability could be used as a powerful reward mechanism to its hosts: those who provided positive experiences for guests and received good reviews would get vaulted to the top of search results, giving them greater exposure and increasing their chances of future bookings. But decline too many requests or respond too slowly or cancel too many reservations or simply appear inhospitable in reviews, and Airbnb can drop a powerful hammer: it can lower your listing in search results or even deactivate your account.
Behave well, though, and Airbnb will shine its love upon you. If you hit a certain series of performance metrics—in the past year, if you have hosted at least ten trips, if you have maintained a 90 percent response rate or higher, if you have received a five-star review at least 80 percent of the time, and if you’ve canceled a reservation only rarely or in extenuating circumstances, you are automatically elevated to “Superhost” status. That means you get a special logo on your site, your listing will be bumped way up in the rankings, you’ll get access to a dedicated customer-support line, and you might even get the chance to preview new products and attend events. The reward-based ecosystem works: these days, Airbnb’s platform is populated with two hundred thousand Superhosts, and while not every one of them is perfect, of course, awarding the status is Airbnb’s most powerful tool for ratcheting up the service while not actually having any control over the people delivering it.
The “Hosticians”
Airbnb’s data reveals that the average host makes around $6,000 a year, but many hosts make much more than that. Evelyn Badia has turned her hosting business into a full-fledged branded enterprise. A charismatic former producer of television commercials, she runs two listings out of her three-story, two-family row house in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Badia, fifty, started hosting when she lost her job in 2010 and now hosts full-time, making a “low six-figure” income by booking her listings about 80 percent of the time; she says she’s hosted four hundred people. A few years in, she started a consulting business for hosts, Evelyn Badia Consultations, for which she charges ninety-five dollars per hour. There were other similar services, but she felt they were run by young guys offering tips for monetization and efficiency, and women were not being spoken to: “I was, like, ‘Dude, do you realize how many hosts are baby boomers and over forty?’” In 2014, she added a blog and a subscription newsletter, anointing herself a “hostician” and sharing her learnings with others. She also hosts a monthly webinar—Chip Conley has been a guest—sells a house manual for thirty-nine dollars, and runs a Facebook group called The Hosting Journey, which has more than seven hundred members. She has become a quasi-celebrity in the Airbnb hosting community, holding barbecues and events for area hosts and speaking at the 2016 Airbnb Open in Los Angeles. She’s thinking of offering a class on the challenges of dating and hosting on Airbnb. (Being single and bringing suitors home while also hosting guests is, she says, “like living with your parents.”)
Pol McCann, a fifty-two-year-old Superhost in Sydney, Australia, first used Airbnb as a guest when he and his boyfriend came to New York City on vacation in 2012. They rented a studio apartment in Alphabet City for what McCann says was less than half what they’d pay for a hotel—a price so low that they were able to extend their stay from three nights to twelve. Everything on the trip worked so well that McCann thought he should try listing his own apartment back in Sydney. He spruced it up, took some photos, and listed it, and within twenty-four hours he had his first booking. Within short order, his apartment was booked twenty-eight or twenty-nine days a month. After six months, he had earned enough from renting the apartment that he was able to put down a deposit on a second apartment in the same complex across the street.
Between the two properties, he estimates that he earns $100,000 a year after his costs. In mid-2015, he then put a deposit down on a third apartment, a much bigger one-bedroom that he spent six months renovating. He’s done the math and worked it all out: by the time he’s ready to retire, in five years, the apartments will be paid off and he’ll become a permanent, full-time host.
Jonathan Morgan, forty-one, runs six listings out of three homes in Savannah, Georgia: one entire home that he rents, three rooms in the house where he lives, and two rooms in a vacation house on an island off the coast, to which he shuttles people by boat. He says he started hosting in 2010—“when there were twelve people in the Airbnb office”—and he’s ridden the wave of Airbnb and seen the members of its community grow more sophisticated. In his early days, he says, “nobody knew what to do, what the experience was. ‘Are you the psycho killer? Or am I the psycho killer?’” He draws young, tech-savvy travelers and invests in things that appeal to them: twelve fixed-gear bicycles, video-game systems—“anything that will attract our target group, because then our lives are easier.” He charges from seventy to ninety-nine dollars per night and accrues some intangible benefits, too: his last two girlfriends have been Airbnb guests he rented to.
Let a Million Pillow-Fluffers Bloom
The growth of the Airbnb host community has also fueled a robust cottage industry of start-ups offering services to support them, everything from linen changing, pillow fluffing, turndown service, key exchanges, property management, minibar services, tax compliance, data analytics, and more. Call them the “pick and shovel” purveyors of the Airbnb gold rush: there are dozens of these start-ups, almost all of them started by Airbnb users themselves who spotted a need, hole, or pain point somewhere in the process. Many of them are raising venture funding. Guesty, a professional management service for hosts, started by Israeli twin brothers, is one of the largest: hosts give Guesty access to their Airbnb accounts, and it handles booking management, all guest communication, calendar updating, and scheduling and coordinating with cleaners and other local service providers, for a fee of 3 percent of the booking charge. San Francisco–based Pillow creates a listing, hires cleaners, handles keys, and employs an algorithm to determine best pricing options. HonorTab brings a minifridge concept to Airbnb. Everbooked was founded by a self-described yield-management geek with expertise in data science who saw the need for dynamic pricing tools for Airbnb hosts.
One of the biggest chores that hosts often need help with, for example, is turning over keys to guests. It can be hard to always arrange to be home when the guest arrives, especially if the host has a full-time job, or is out of town, or when travelers’ flights are delayed. Clayton Brown, a Stanford Business School alum living in Vancouver who worked in finance, started using Airbnb in 2012 to list his apartment whenever he traveled on business, and soon identified the key-exchange process as his biggest point of friction. He would arrange for his cleaning service to be at the apartment to let the guest in, but on one occasion a guest’s flight was late, the cleaner had gone home, and the guest had to take a taxi to the cleaner’s house in the remote suburbs to fetch the key, leading to frustrations all around. “I started thinking, “ ‘There has to be a better way, and Airbnb is growing crazy fast, so maybe there’s something here,’” Brown says. In 2013 he and a partner started a company that essentially turns local cafés, bars, and gyms into neighborhood key-exchange hubs. Keycafe provides the establishment with a kiosk, and the host pays $12.95 per month (plus a fee of $1.95 per key pickup) for an RFID-enabled key fob. Travelers are remotely assigned a unique access code through the Keycafe app, which they then use to unlock the kiosk. The host gets notified anytime a key is picked up or dropped off, and the local establishments like the arrangement because it brings in foot traffic.
While Keycafe serves customers beyond just Airbnb, including dog walkers and other service professionals, Airbnb and property managers are more than half its business, and the company is one of the stronger Airbnb “bolt-ons”: it is an official partner in Airbnb’s Host Assist platform, which integrates some of these vendors into its website, and Brown and his business partner have raised almost $3 million, more than most of the other ancillary services. “As Airbnb has become larger and the valuation and sheer scale of the company has grown, it’s kind of a known play in the venture space,” Brown says.
Airbnb has been gathering hosts informally since the beginning, but in 2014 it formalized these efforts with the launch of Airbnb Open, its first global summit of hosts. That November, some 1,500 hosts from around the world convened upon San Francisco for three days of talks, seminars, dinners, and other forms of Airbnb immersion. They heard inspirational stories from a series of speakers. They heard from Chesky, who in a rare moment was visibly overwhelmed as he took the stage and asked them to stand up if hosting has changed who they are as a person (they stood). They heard from Conley, who told them to save their personalized badges and gift bags, because five or six years from now, “this will be the largest hospitality event around the world.”
The next year, in 2015, the Open was much bigger: held in Paris as a nod to the significance of that market—it is the company’s largest market in terms of both listings and guests—the event drew five thousand hosts and more than six hundred Airbnb employees to the Grande Halle de la Villette for the three-day gathering. Attendees, who paid their own way, would hear speakers as varied as the Swiss-born philosopher and author Alain de Botton and home-tidying guru Marie Kondo. They’d hear inspiration from Chesky, Gebbia, Blecharczyk, and Conley, as well as updates from the company’s head of product, Joe Zadeh, and head of engineering Mike Curtis. They’d get an update on the regulatory battle from the head of legal and business affairs, Belinda Johnson, and public-policy chief Chris Lehane. They would be entertained by Cirque du Soleil. The event was months and months in the works, was a major production, and began as planned; at the end of day one, the crowd disbursed to a thousand simultaneous dinners held at hosts’ residences and restaurants all around the City of Lights.
After a rousing day two, on November 13, 2015, that night the cofounders hosted a reunion of the company’s first forty employees who were still there, which it billed as the Tenth Street Dinner. Held at an Airbnb listing in the Eighteenth Arrondissement, it was a catered dinner designed to celebrate all that the company had achieved. Chesky had delivered two keynotes that day, and now, surrounded by his friends and family, he felt he could relax and, for once, take a moment to sit back and reflect on all they had accomplished.
But an hour or so into the dinner, just after Gebbia had given a toast, Chesky and others in the room started getting buzzed on their phones. A shooting had been reported at a restaurant a few miles away. At first it seemed like an isolated incident, albeit a troubling one, so they went back to their dinner. But soon news of more attacks came in: explosions were reported at the Stade de France, the city’s soccer stadium. Now there were mass shootings in the Tenth Arrondissement; there was a hostage situation at the Bataclan. It was, of course, the horrific, ISIS-coordinated terrorist attack that would kill 130 people and injure almost 400 more. And Airbnb had 645 employees and 5,000 hosts out at dinners scattered throughout the entire city. Many were staying in neighborhoods where the shootings took place. One of their groups was at the stadium.
Chesky got in touch with his head of security and staged a makeshift command center from the upstairs bathroom of the Airbnb listing where the dinner took place. With a lockdown in place all night, they cleared out the furniture and put down as many pillows and blankets as they could. Over the course of the long night, they accounted for every single employee and host; no one had been harmed. The next day, they canceled the rest of the program and worked on flying everyone home. That Sunday, one hundred employees boarded a plane bound for San Francisco.
In November 2014, four months after the company launched “Belong anywhere” as its mission, Chesky went back to Douglas Atkin. He said that he loved “Belong anywhere,” and he truly felt it would be the company’s mission for the next hundred years. But he still had some pressing questions: What does it actually mean? How do you measure it? How does it happen? He sent Atkin back out on another focus-group odyssey to figure it out. When Atkin came back, after talking to another three hundred hosts and guests around the world, he had an answer: belonging anywhere wasn’t just a single moment; it was a transformation people experienced when they traveled on Airbnb. The company has codified this as something it calls the “belong anywhere transformation journey,” which goes like this: When travelers leave their homes, they feel alone. They reach their Airbnb and they feel accepted and taken care of by their host. They then feel safe to be the same kind of person they are when they’re at home. And when that happens, they feel like freer, better, more complete versions of themselves, and their journey is complete.
This is Airbnb-speak, and while it may sound hokey to the rest of us, Chesky and Atkin would say this is a huge reason why Airbnb took off the way that it did. There is a cultlike devotion among Airbnb’s truest believers, who embrace this vision. (During his focus-group travels exploring the meaning of Airbnb, Atkin encountered one host in Athens who had painted “Belong anywhere” on his bedroom wall, and another in Korea who had changed her name to a Korean phrase meaning “welcome to my house.” But whether or not it is a full-fledged “transformation journey” for the average traveler, Airbnb has enjoyed success that is about something more than just low prices and freely available, quirky spaces. It touches on something bigger and deeper.
The opportunity to show some humanity or to receive some expression of humanity from others, even if you never experience that person outside a few messages, some fluffed towels, and a welcome note, has become rare in our disconnected world. This is another element about Airbnb (and other short-term-rental services) that makes it uniquely different from other aspects of the so-called “sharing economy.” At its core, Airbnb involves the most intimate human interactions—visiting people in their homes, sleeping in their beds, using their bathrooms. (Even in the listings that are run by professionals, there is still the semblance of this one-to-one intimacy.) That is of course precisely what makes it polarizing and objectionable to so many people who can never imagine using it. But it’s also what makes it unique. This kind of “sharing”—this hyperpersonal opening up of the most intimate and safest aspect of one’s life to a stranger—is not present when you hire a person to fix a leak on TaskRabbit, or when you get into someone’s air-conditioned black car for a silent ride to the airport with your head in your phone. More than anything else, it is this aspect of Airbnb that distinguishes it from Uber, Lyft, and any other of its sharing-economy peers. Elisa Schreiber, marketing partner at Greylock Partners, an investor in the company, summarized this distinction concisely after we got to talking about it one day. “Uber is transactional,” she said. “Airbnb is humanity.”
Unfortunately, as we are about to see and as Airbnb has learned, despite its best intentions, that “humanity” can be a frustrating thing. It is not always well meaning, and it is not always good.