The tech industry has been caught in the war between Russian and Ukraine, but Airbnb is emerging as a platform for humanitarian aid.
Many tech companies have been pulling their services and products from Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine, essentially imposing their own sanctions on the country. In the case of Airbnb, however, customers are making reservations in Ukraine despite having no plans of using them. The goal is merely to use Airbnb as a platform for sending money to those who may need it.
According to Business Insider, one of the main motivations is concerns about charitable and humanitarian efforts that have been put in place. Many individuals are leery of such organizations, doubting whether their money will really make to those in need, or disappear into a quagmire of bureaucracy. With Airbnb, in contrast, a specified amount of the rental fee is guaranteed to make it to the intended recipient.
“I see politics being played out and I understand why NATO cannot go in, but I feel very sad and heartbroken for the people … being slaughtered,” Yan Asmann, an associate professor at Mayo Clinic who booked three nights in Kiev, told Insider. “It’s very hard to watch day-by-day.”
The innovative use of Airbnb is another demonstration of the democratizing effect tech platforms can have, even on something as basic as humanitarian aid.
As it turns out, one of the most popular requests was for crypto support. As some individuals pointed out, this would make it much easier for overseas customers, since some countries block international payments.
Airbnb’s accepting crypto would be a major boost to the overall crypto market, and provide customers with an excellent option to simplify international payments.
Some of the biggest websites on the internet were down, thanks to a service disruption at Akamai Technologies.
Users (including yours truly) started getting DNS errors when visiting common websites. The list of impacted sites include Airbnb, Delta, FedEx, McDonald’s, UPS and many more.
Akamai has said the issue was the result of a service disruption, and has already taken steps to fix the it.
We have implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations. We will continue to monitor to ensure that the impact has been fully mitigated.
An Airbnb commissioned survey reveals that the work at home trend will be transforming into the ‘working from any home’ in 2021. The survey conducted by ClearPath Strategies says that 83% of employees are in favor of relocating as part of remote working. Over 25% believe they will be able to ‘live where they want to and work remotely’. This would assume that many companies will not require employees to come into physical locations on a regular basis for group meetings or strategy sessions.
One in five of those surveyed have relocated their living situation during the pandemic either temporarily or permanently, according to the survey. Surprisingly, 60% of parents are very or somewhat likely to consider working remotely and traveling with their children if schools continue to be disrupted.
Not so surprisingly, Airbnb says that from July to September of this year, there has been a 128% increase in guest reviews mentioning “relocation”, “relocate”, “remote work” and “trying a new neighborhood” in comparison to the same time frame last year.
There is also a big trend out of cities and into suburbs and rural areas. Since the pandemic started, 24% of people say they moved to a suburb and 21% to a rural area. Additionally, Airbnb reveals that those that can work from anywhere are booking longer stays of two or more weeks.
One of the ways travelers are taking advantage of this trend is trying before they buy–turning to Airbnb to test new neighborhoods and cities before making a long-term commitment. From July to September this year, there has been a 128 percent increase in guest reviews mentioning “relocation”, “relocate”, “remote work” and “trying a new neighborhood” in comparison to the same time frame last year.
“We said every single opportunity is a moment where we have to pivot and move fast,” says Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. “What actually happened was, first of all, you have to have the mindset, a mindset of hope, of optimism, and of resiliency, that we’re going to get through this. And not only are we going to get through this but every one of these crises is going to lead to a new point of innovation. Let’s look for moments and a moment happened.”
Brian Chesky, co-founder, and CEO, Airbnb, discussed with author and podcasterSimon Sinek how the pandemic crisis motivated the company to be more innovative:
Every Crisis Should Lead To A New Point Of Innovation
Andy Grove, one of the founders of Intel, said that bad companies are destroyed by a crisis, good companies survive a crisis, but great companies are defined by a crisis. I wanted us to be in that third bucket. So much of it is mindset. If you think you’re going to win, if you think that this is going to define you in a positive way and you’re going to learn something from it and it’s going to make you stronger, it kind of happens. So much of your mindset as the leader becomes the psychology of the organization and that psychology really becomes a collective consciousness. It becomes real.
So that was the thing. We said every single opportunity is a moment where we have to pivot and move fast. What actually happened was, first of all, you have to have the mindset, a mindset of hope, of optimism, and of resiliency, that we’re going to get through this. And not only are we going to get through this but every one of these crises is going to lead to a new point of innovation. Let’s look for moments and a moment happened.
In Just 14 Days We Pivoted The Entire Product Line
With social distancing, we had to shut down in-person Airbnb Experiences. Airbnb is known for homes but we also have three-hour activities that you can book with people all over the world. They got paused. Suddenly, we started doing listening sessions with our hosts. It’s important, by the way, to listen and be curious. I don’t think it’s so much in life that you have to have ideas as much as it is to be a receiver for ideas. It’s not my job to have an idea and it’s not our job for any of us to have ideas. We need to be receivers. We’re like radio antennas, we just got to get on the right signal and people will tell you things.
People told us they wanted to host but since they can’t do it in person, can they offer them online? At first, I thought to myself, no you can’t offer them online. We’re about connections in the real world. Then, I thought, well if that’s the case there’s not going to be a lot of connections anytime soon. So we quickly realized that we should get in on this. So within 14 days, we pivoted the entire product line to offer online experiences. Now we have 800 experiences and 200 Olympians including Jackie Joyner-Kersee. They do these activities where you can actually go online and meet them and remotely be on an Experience with them.
Preservation Mode Is A Very Dangerous Place To Be
I think so much of it was turning on a dime. I never wanted to just be focused on survival. If you focus on survival that’s probably all you’re going to get. All these other companies I saw were like just shuddering their businesses and just in defensive mode and preservation mode. I think preservation mode is a very dangerous place to be. The more resources the company accumulates the more they start worrying about losing things. It’s like a parent with an overactive amygdala putting the helmet on their child before they go outside because you’re worried something’s going to happen. They can never live their life.
It’s the same thing with a company. You have got to be concerned but not so concerned that you protect the company from itself and you’re afraid to do anything and you’re just preserving resources. Actually, that’s the worst possible thing ironically for shareholders. Shareholders need the company to grow. This weird obsession sometimes that some people have with serving shareholders is not actually in the shareholder’s best interest. They need companies to create value and therefore they need to be focused on doing new things people love. That’s what needs to happen to create value.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky: Every Crisis Should Lead To A New Point Of Innovation
“One trend that is going to happen is that travel as we knew it is over,” says Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. “It doesn’t mean travel is over, just the travel we knew is over… and it’s never coming back. It’s just not. Not surprising, we’ve spent twelve years building Airbnb’s business and lost almost all of it in a matter of four to six weeks.”
Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, discusses how COVID has wreaked havoc on the travel industry and Airbnb and how it has literally changed travel as we know it.
Airbnb’s Built Over 12 Years – Gone in 6 Weeks
One thing I’ve learned is not to try to get in the business of predicting the future. Anyone who has made predictions has not done very well in the last few months. What I can tell you is the following. Beginning with March travel was at a standstill, almost virtually stopped. There were 2.5 billion people locked down. Not surprising, we’ve spent twelve years building Airbnb’s business and lost almost all of it in a matter of four to six weeks.
What’s happened over the last three or four months though is something else entirely. People are saying they want to get out of the house but they want to be safe. They don’t want to get on airplanes. They don’t want to travel for business. They don’t want to go to cities and they don’t want to cross borders. What they are willing to do is to get in a car and drive a couple hundred miles to a small community where they are willing to stay in a house.
Now Something Remarkable Has Happened
Because of that, although our business has not recovered, something remarkable happened. At the end of May and early June, we have the same volume of bookings in the United States as the year before… without any marketing. Zero marketing whatsoever. This is just showing that people are yearning for something. They’re yearning for connection. They want to be connected to the communities and to each other. They want to get outside. I think that travel is going to come back. It’s just going to take a lot longer than we would have thought and it’s going to be different.
We have dramatically reduced our costs. We reduced our cost and it was an incredibly difficult and harrowing experience. We said that we don’t know how long this storm will take so I’m going to hope for the best but I’m planning for the worst. So if there is a new shutdown or multiple shutdowns and travel stops again we will be okay because of the changes we’ve made. We’ve cut nearly a billion dollars of marketing. We’ve had to reduce our staff, and we’ve become very lean and nimble.
We’ve also been resilient. We’ve launched online experiences that people can do from home. We have longer term stays. A large percentage of our bookings, almost a fifth, are for stays longer than 30 days. Another thing is that we have not lost any hosts on our platform. We actually have more hosts and homes today than before COVID started. The important thing here is that the market is resilient.
Travel As We Knew It Is Over
One trend that is going to happen is that travel as we knew it is over. It doesn’t mean travel is over, just the travel we knew is over… and it’s never coming back. It’s just not. No one quite knows what it will look like but I have a couple of thoughts. Instead of the world’s population traveling to only a few cities and staying in big tourist districts we are going to see a redistribution of where people travel. They’re going to start traveling because they are going nearby to thousands of local communities.
We have had fairly ambitious real estate expansion plans and we have paused those plans. We are not adding more real estate. I think more people are going to work remotely. Also, working from home can be working from any home, and that’s an opportunity for Airbnb. You are going to see major population redistribution on the table. Not everyone is going to want to live in the same city. That being said, we don’t know the full cost of entire workforces being remote.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky: Travel As We Knew It Is Over
The Head of Policy at Airbnb, Chris Lehane, says that they are seeing the same underlying dynamics and trends of millennials driving Airbnb growth in China that they saw earlier globally. With 400 million millennials living in China, the growth potential for Airbnb is massive. He noted that millennials will be 75 percent of consumers going forward and home sharing is how they like to travel.
Chris Lehane, Head of Global Policy And Communications for Airbnb, talked about the huge growth of the company and their massive potential for even more growth driven by millennials in China and around the world in an interview on Bloomberg:
Airbnb’s Single Biggest Quarter Ever
As we released on Friday, we are significantly over a billion dollars in revenue in Q3, our single biggest quarter ever. We are blessed ultimately by this really significant and robust growth. Ultimately that’s tracking to the community model that exists on Airbnb. We only do well if our hosts do well, hosts do well if our guests do well, guests do well only if communities are benefitting. That flywheel does create a network effect globally. You can see that underneath these growth numbers, 91 percent growth in Bejing. Over 79 percent growth in places like Mexico City or even Birmingham, England.
Home Sharing is How Millennials Like to Travel
Ultimately what’s really underlying the foundation for all of that is that people are looking for this type of travel. More people are going to be able to do home sharing type of travel, people to people travel tomorrow than today. This is not new, Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, they did home sharing, but in particular, this is what consumers are looking for, particularly millennial consumers who are going to be 75 percent plus of all consumers going forward. This is how they like to travel.
400 Million Millennials in China – A Huge Opportunity for Airbnb
Looking at our global numbers, what we are seeing in China really does reflect the same thing that we are seeing globally. We are blessed with this growth which is being driven by that network effect that exists locally. What we are seeing in China is really interesting. It has the same underlying dynamics and trends that we saw with the business earlier.
When Airbnb was first launched the majority of users were millennials. If you look at our China market right now about 85 percent of our consumers are millennials. It’s a similar trend, but keeping in mind that there are 400 million millennials in China. We are really the significant player in what’s called the outbound travel, people going from China abroad. What’s happening is they come back and then they begin to travel domestically and Airbnb begins to grow as a result of that.
China is a place you have to get up every day and work incredibly hard. We do have a president of the business who is from China based on the ground there. We have an incredible team made up of Chinese folks who are on the ground there in Bejing and other offices around the country. I feel good about where we are but I know that we need to keep working at it.
Peter Lorimer, co-host with Genevieve Gorder of the Netflix show “Stay Here” which helps people successfully rent their homes on Airbnb. “To succeed in the world of short-term rental you have to offer more than just a comfortable place to sleep,” said Lorimar in a promo for the show.
“Stay Here” co-host Peter Lorimer recently discussed the show in an interview on Fox Business (full interview below):
Helping People Get More ROI From Airbnb
We call it the ‘junk drawer’ kind of philosophy. I think it is changing, the business is evolving now, but it used to be Granny’s old apartment or the garden shed, you just throw a little bed in it and it was full of rotten old furniture and horrid flowery sheets. Too much stuff… and too much old stuff. But now people are looking at it as a business and our show is one of the first out there helping people get more ROI.
People Making Massive Income on Airbnb with Minor Modifications
There are a fraction of people right now that are making a massive income with just minor modifications. The worst thing people can do is leave their Airbnb rental in kind of a soulless vacuum to fend for themselves. If I’m flying into Frankfort, Germany and I want to stay in an Airbnb I want to experience Frankfort through the eyes of a local. I don’t want to roll up with my three screaming kids wondering what the wifi is, no snacks, and the place being a little bit dirty.
Dirty is the Worst
Dirty is the worst. What I try to do with my clients in Los Angeles, and I’ve been doing Airbnb before it was even cool, I say remove your head and pretend this is not your home. Pretend you are walking in for the first time and what you don’t like and then I have to point it out. Too much clutter is number one. Bad taste is number two. There is a little bit of bad taste in L.A. and all over the country. Then number three is to anticipate what the guests want before they want it.
Why Are People Renting on Airbnb?
Some people are getting extra houses and some people are flipping into extra properties. I have a client and a friend who is the marketing director of a big Fortune 500 company and he said, “Pete, I’m taking off to Bangkok, I’m going to stay there for nine months, can you rent out my place, I’m just going to be on the beach banging away on my laptop and I want to make a profit to cover my travel, all of my expenses, and have my mortgage paid.” And he’s doing it.
Millenials Embracing the Shared Economy
I wanted to forge my own flavor of real estate which was very kind of rock and roll and that seemed to work really well with the newer generation, the Millenials and younger who embraced the shared economy.
It appears that Netflix isn’t the only tech company looking to take advantage of the “Cuban Thaw”, the recent decision by the Obama administration to warm up trade and travel relations between the US and Cuba after decades of restrictions.
Home rental service Airbnb has officially expanded into Cuba.
“We believe that Cuba could become one of Airbnb’s biggest markets in Latin America,” Kay Kuehne, regional director for Airbnb, told the AP. “We are actually plugging into an existing culture of micro-enterprise in Cuba. The hosts in Cuba have been doing for decades what we just started doing seven years ago.”
Kuehne says that both the US and Cuba are supportive of Airbnb’s moves.
If you search the Airbnb website for Cuban accommodations, you’ll turn up more than 1,000 listings. Apparently, the majority (about 40%) are in and around Havana. Only US travelers can book Cuban stays on Airbnb.
Unlike Netflix, whose core service is hampered by internet access issues enough to make the move into Cuba a bit meaningless at the time being, Airbnb’s core business (travel) is about to be booming.
As of right now, Americans can only travel to Cuba if their visit falls into one of 12 government-sanctioned reasons. These include family visits, journalistic activities, religious purposes, humanitarian projects, and educational activities. Of course, Americans wanting to head to Cuba for a simple vacation can take liberties with their motivations.
Airbnb is currently available in over 190 countries and 34,000+ cities. It’s likely that Cuba will soon become one of Airbnb’s most popular destinations.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman released a report documenting what it says is “widespread illegality” across Airbnb’s New York City listings. It says evidence indicates that nearly three quarters (72%) of listings in the city violate the law.
Of 35,354 private, short-term listings, 25,532 violated either New York State’s Multiple Dwelling Law and/or New York City’s Administrative Code (zoning laws), the report claims. Meanwhile, hosts generated roughly $304 million in revenue from these listings alone while Airbnb earned about $40 million.
The data used for the report was obtained by the Attorney General’s Office after a May 2014 subpoena for information about potential illegal hotels using Airbnb.
The Attorney General and the City of New York have also announced a joint enforcement initiative against illegal hotels. They intend to investigate and shut down illegal hotels in the five boroughs.
““This report raises serious concerns about the proliferation of illegal hotels and the impact of Airbnb and sites like it on the City of New York,” said Schneiderman. “We must ensure that, as online marketplaces revolutionize the way we live, laws designed to promote safety and quality-of-life are not forsaken under the pretext of innovation. The joint city and state enforcement initiative is aimed at aggressively tackling this growing problem, protecting the safety of tourists and safeguarding the quality-of-life of neighborhood residents.”
“Together, the Attorney General’s Internet and Taxpayer Protection Bureaus and the City’s Departments of Finance and Buildings along with the Office of Special Enforcement will investigate violations of building and safety codes, tax regulations and the executive law,” the AG’s Office said.
The report claims that commercial enterprises are using Airbnb to operate multimillion-dollar businesses. On such business made $6.8 million in less than five years.
It also says numerous units appear to have served as “illegal hostels,” adding, “New York law prohibits commercial enterprises from operating hostels. In 2013, approximately 200 units were booked through Airbnb for more than 365 nights during the year, indicating that multiple, unrelated guests shared the same unit on the same night, as they would in a hostel. The 10 most-rented units were booked for an average of 1,900 nights in 2013, with one top listing average 13 reservations per unit per night.”
In a lengthy blog post, you can read about the company’s major redesign. This is a site-wide redesign that touches both web and mobile. Airbnb says that this is all about belonging. I believe them.
Unfortunately, this massive overhaul is being overshadowed by the simple, but undeniable fact that the company’s new logo looks like balls.
Not like balls as in bad. I mean actual balls…or a vagina…or a butt…or a butthole…or some hybrid of genitalia.
If you’re not seeing it, well, I don’t really understand. But here are some other opinions that prove I’m not making a vagina out of a logo here:
“So I guess the ‘BnB’ actually stands for balls and butthole.” – Our office’s take on @Airbnb’s new logo
Wrong. According to Airbnb, it’s actually a “Bélo” – short for belong.
“It’s a symbol for people who want to try a new tea they’ve never heard of from a village they couldn’t find on the map. It’s a symbol for going where the locals go—the cafe that doesn’t bother with a menu, the dance club hidden down a long alleyway, the art galleries that don’t show up in the guidebooks. It’s a symbol for people who want to welcome into their home new experiences, new cultures, and new conversations. We’re proud to introduce the Bélo: the universal symbol of belonging,” says the company.
And I repeat – I feel so bad for these people right now.
Airbnb also wants you to create your own version of the Bélo. They even made a fun little tool for it. I just made my own version!
Oh my god, guys. How many levels of review did this go through?
The genital nature of their new logo may not even be the biggest issue for Airbnb…
One of the most endearing qualities of Airbnb is that it offers travelers a more unique experience. Instead of booking an expensive hotel room in Barcelona, why not find someone who’s willing to let you crash at their apartment in a really cool part of town? Airbnb has always been about unique experiences, but a new feature they’re testing might just take that whole concept a step further.
Airbnb is currently experimenting with letting people offer up unique experiences to potential travelers. Currently, these “experiences” are only available in San Francisco and Paris, but Airbnb will no doubt open it up to more and more cities if the concept is a hit.
In San Francisco, for instance, you can check out experiences in four categoires: Food & Drinks, sightseeing, outdoors, and explore & learn.
In one example, Daniel is offering to cook you “the magic of his BBQ” from his North Beach rooftop garden. For $18, Daniel will introduce you to the city while cooking you dinner on May 28th and 7:00 pm.
Or Pamela will take you hike the “outside lands” of San Francisco with her.
“Our hike will begin at the Coastal Trail at Lands End Look Out where a 1.5 mile “out and back” trail weaves through time and space like a tale of two cities: coastal wilderness meets high-tech civilization. You will see the ruins of the Sutro Baths, opened in 1894 by Adolph Sutro, whose vision was to bring the 99% out to his 1.7 million gallon sea-water filled swimming pool. We’ll be scouting the sea for pods of porpoise and fog-drenched cliffs for coastal plants, as powerful tides “roll in” through the “Gate” in this rarefied natural landscape. I’ll be your Interpretive guide to the cultural history, flora and fauna which includes 36 endangered species in this designated UNESCO bioreserve,” she says.
Sounds like a fun time. She’s charging $40 and does the guided hike every Monday at 10am and Wednesday at 4pm.
Each “experience” listing on Airbnb work like each residence listing–it allows users to rate and review.
It’s just a small test right now, and there’s no guarantee that this will become part of Airbnb’s overall model. The company gave a non-statement statement to TechCrunch:
“We are always experimenting with new ways to create meaningful experiences on Airbnb, we currently don’t have any updates to share.”
What do you think? Would you like Airbnb to be more than just room bookings?
New York hotels are notorious for being ridiculously expensive. Well, they are if you have your eyes set on one of many extravagant locations seen in film throughout the years. For the person staying in New York on a budget, you can either get a room in a crummy hotel on the outskirts or stay in somebody’s house via Airbnb. The latter might be a little more difficult, however, thanks to the startup running into some trouble with the state.
CNN reports that Airbnb is now fighting against what it sees as unfair regulations in New York. The state’s attorney general Eric Schneiderman wants to put in new regulations that would severely hamper Airbnb’s business of helping everyday people rent out their homes to strangers. At the moment, Schneiderman is already pushing for the identity of those who rent out their homes via Airbnb as he feels they may be violating New York’s housing laws.
Speaking at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference, Airbnb’s co-founder and CTO Nathan Blecharczyk says New York isn’t pushing for regulation that helps the everyday consumer. Instead, he sees the state just wanting to protect the status quo that sees only New York hotels being able to rent out rooms to those staying in the city. After all, opening up the homes of its citizens to tourists and visitors would pull a lot of business away from the expensive hotels. Instead of competing with that by lowering prices or offering more services, the hotel industry would prefer the state to regulate Airbnb out of existence.
Despite his objections, Schneiderman does have a point when he says that some Airbnb hosts are breaking the law. In the city, it’s illegal to host somebody for less than 30 days when the host doesn’t live in the house to begin with. Airbnb does its best to remove listings that conflict with this law and it has already removed 2,000 such listings. Schneiderman fired back by saying that Airbnb needs to police itself better and that it needs to provide data on who is listing their homes – both of which Airbnb has refused to do so far.
So, why should Airbnb be allowed to do what it wants within reason? As Blecharczyk puts it, Airbnb is pumping money into the local economy. Those who host guests in their homes take that money and spend it at the local coffee shop or other local neighborhood businesses. He also says New York should allow the company to company to collect hotel taxes so it can pump $21 million into local government coffers. That alone should be a sufficient enough reason to let Airbnb be a recognized hotel business in the state.
Like Tesla and Uber, Airbnb is an entirely new way of looking at an old problem. As such, it threatens the old businesses that have been playing by the same rules for decades. Instead of adapting to this new reality, these old businesses go to the government hoping to have these new upstarts regulated out of existence. After all, why should a hotel have to lower its prices or offer better service when it can go crying to the government? Airbnb is a breath of fresh air in New York and hotels would be wise to start competing instead of asking for regulation.
A lot of crazy stuff happens in Florida – so much so that it’s become a pretty common joke to attach “where else” to any statement of some sort of bizarre occurrence in the state of Florida. Seriously, have you met Florida man?
But cheer up, Floridians. According to travel site Airbnb, you are home to the most hospitable city in the United States. After combing through hundreds of thousands of reviews from more than 4 million guests, Airbnb calculated a Hospitality Index that measure the quality of hosts in cities across America.
And it’s a Southern and Western beatdown.
Here are the top ten most hospitable cities, according to Airbnb:
Tampa, FL
Mendocino, CA
Eugene, OR
Bend, OR
Raleigh, NC
Memphis, TN
Madison, WI
Nashville, TN
Tucson, AZ
Lake Tahoe, CA
Man. What’s up, the North?
“Conspicuously absent are big cities and the Northeast. This isn’t to say that we don’t have any exceptional hosts in these areas – we definitely know of many amazing hosts around the country—but in aggregate, they are outshined by our Southern and Western hosts,” says Airbnb.
Airbnb looked at a handful of factors in creating their Hospitality Index based on user reviews. These factors were cleanliness, ease of check-in, communication, value, and accuracy (or how the location met expectations).
“There’s a long history of criticism surrounding 5-star review systems. For example, scores tend to be binary (5 or 1). But we can be confident that a 5-star score is a good experience, at minimum. So for the index we looked at the percentage of trips (not reviews, which would be biased by review rates) where guests give 5-star scores for all of the above criteria,” says Airbnb.
“Trust is the key to our community,” says Airbnb’s Vivek Wagle. “There is no place for anonymity in a trusted community.”
And with that, Airbnb announces a move that is likely to ruffle the feathers of some users, while engendering a more serious trust in the service in others. Today, the online service that connects travelers with location renters all across the world is unveiling a heightened verification process which they call Airbnb Verified ID. It will force users to match their online IDs (via Airbnb accounts, Facebook, or LinkedIn) with their offline identities, verifiable with a government-issued ID or some sort of official questionnaire.
“Verified ID provides a connection between the online and offline spaces. Airbnb users can earn a “Verified ID” badge on their profile by providing their online identity (via existing Airbnb reviews, LinkedIn, or Facebook) and matching it to offline ID documentation, such as confirming personal information or scanning a photo ID. The name provided by both channels must match for verification to succeed,” says Wagle.
Airbnb is dipping its toes into the new verification, only requiring a random 25% of users to get verified. Users who wish to make last-minute bookings will also be asked to verify their identities. That percentage is likely to increase quickly, as Airbnb says that their end goal is to make all users have a verified ID.
Of course, you may be forced into verifying your account if you want to book certain locations. Hosts can now require that guests are verified.
At Airbnb, hosts can set reservation requirements that they feel comfortable with. Some may choose to only invite guests into their homes who have verified their IDs. If you would like to book with a host who requires their guests to verify their IDs, we’ll prompt you to do so in order to complete the booking process. Any host who requests their guests to verify their ID must also get verified.
If you want to verify your account, you can start the process here. Or, you can simply wait for Airbnb to require it. If Airbnb asks you to do so during a booking, you’ll have 12 hours to complete the process.
Airbnb has to know that this is a bold move. For some users, this will be a deal breaker. That’s unavoidable from Airbnb’s perspective. But there are few online services other the Airbnb where this sort of thing makes sense. I mean, people are hosting and booking homes and apartments with strangers. For a company that has had its share of negative press regarding poor user experiences, this is definitely a strong move to show that they’re all about trust and legitimacy.
Basically, it shows users pages about neighborhoods in cities, so they can decide where they want to stay when they visit.
You can read the full Q&A here, but here’s the part where they explain why they ultimately went with Memcached over a SQL database or DynamoDB:
At first, it seemed we wanted a SQL database, as our data had relations. However, this was ruled out based on the need for mass updates. Next, we looked at an in-house NoSQL solution that we call Dyson. Dyson seemed to give us the flexibility we needed with writes and updates, so we tried it. For reference, Dyson is backed by Amazon’s DynamoDB, a reliable, but limited, managed, NoSQL solution. In essence, if we put the data right into DynamoDB, then Dyson can serve it. This led to the creation of a DynamoDB cascading tap. Countless timeouts, headaches and late nights later, we had a working solution.
However, there was a problem, namely DynamoDB’s 65KB storage limit. When you’re storing uncompressed JSON, that’s a pretty easy target to reach. As a band-aid, we engineered a solution involving pages of tuples. To say this solution was sub-optimal is putting it mildly, and the performance was even worse.
With launch quickly approaching, brilliant words saved the day: “You don’t need a database, you need a [expletive deleted] cache” 1. So that’s what we did, we traded our database for a cache. Specifically, we switched from Dyson to Memcached.
Airbnb, the company that connects travelers with locals willing to rent their spaces (homes, rooms, apartments, etc), announced 10 million nights booked back in June. That’s double what the company claimed back in January. Every two seconds someone books a night with the service, and in order to cater to the specific needs of those millions of travelers Airbnb is launching a local guidebook to some of their most popular cities for rentals.
It’s called Airbnb Neighborhoods, and they claim it’s the “the definitive guide to neighborhood experiences around the world.”
“Airbnb Neighborhoods combine stunning photography, local editorial perspective, and practical information to let you discover the neighborhood for you,” says the company in a blog post.
At launch, Airbnb Neighborhoods is available for locations in Rio de Janeiro, New York City, San francisco, London, Berlin, Paris, and Washington D.C.
One you select one of those cities, the neighborhood guide lets you narrow your search down to what type of area you’re looking to stay in. For instance, in New York you have to option to select “Peace & Quiet” or the exact opposite, “Nightlife.” Let’s say you want to go with “Dining.”
From there, you can select specific neighborhoods that match that tag. Each neighborhood has its own photo-rich page complete with a map, transit times, and information on local attractions. Did I mention that it was photo-rich? Each neighborhood page features dozens upon dozens of great photos from local photographers.
If that area looks right, you can then shoot over to a listing of all available locations.
Airbnb doesn’t say when we can expect more neighborhoods to become available on their new travel guide, but you’d have to expect that more are forthcoming. With Neighborhoods, Airbnb emphasizes exactly why a traveler would want to stay in a quirky apartment in the East Village as opposed to a hotel outside the city.
Airbnb has really taken off, according to some statistics released by the company on Thursday. The company, which allows people to rent out private spaces to travelers, call themselves the “community marketplace for unique spaces.”
The most striking figure that Airbnb now boasts is 5 million+ nights booked through the service. Out of all of those bookings, a quarter consisted of arrangements from a U.S. guest and a U.S. host. The rest of the bookings had either guests, hosts, or both from other countries. In the last year, the amount of booked nights has increased 500%.
Airbnb is now in 19,000+ cities and 192 different countries. They have seen off-the-charts growth in places like Italy, Spain, The UK, and France.
The growth has been so substantial, that Airbnb has announced in their blog post that they will be expanding. This means news offices in six different locations – Barcelona, Copenhagen, Milan, Moscow, Paris, and Sao Paulo. Airbnb already has offices in Berlin, Hamburg, London, and San Francisco.
Founder Joe Gebbia had this to say: “Being closer to our hosts and guests is a natural response. The next chapter will be about spreading the culture and values of Airbnb to our widest international communities.”
Airbnb tackled a little bit of controversy recently, as a couple of customers reported that their house had been burglarized and that Airbnb’s response was less than helpful. Airbnb apologized for the incidents, and by the looks of these figures, they haven’t done any lasting harm to the company.
“Community marketplace for unique spaces” Airbnb announced today that it has received $112 million in Series b financing from Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, and General Catalyst.
When you add that to their previous funding, Airbnb now boasts total funding of $119.8 million. According to them, this new funding will be used to “fuel growth, accelerate the hiring of a world-class team and strengthen the Airbnb community at the local level.” Read: expansion.
Airbnb is a startup that allows people to forgo traditional lodging and stay in privately listed locations when they are traveling. People who want to rent out their properties can list them through the site and once a renter shows interest, the host has total control over whether or not they allow the prospective renters in their space.
According to Tech Crunch, the split looks like $60 million from Andreessen Horowitz, $40 million from DST Global and $5 million from General Catalyst.
Airbnb’s valuation reportedly sits at $1.3 billion.
“Over the past three years, we’ve built a community marketplace for unique properties and brought it into the mainstream and into almost every country on the planet,” said Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. “Today is a watershed moment – both for Airbnb as a company and for our community – that will enable us to touch new markets and expand our vision to make the world’s most interesting and inspiring places accessible to our users.”
Here are some stats that Airbnb dropped today –
2 million nights booked, doubling from 1 million just 4 months ago
Their site receives over 30 million page views a month
Since May, their number of Social Connections has tripled to 54 million
Airbnb is in over 16,000 cities in 186 countries.
“We’re thrilled to have led this investment round in Airbnb. The company is defining a completely new category in e-commerce – a marketplace for all kinds of spaces, from homes and apartments to tree houses and yachts,” said Jeff Jordan, general partner, Andreessen Horowitz. “Airbnb’s explosive growth and passionate community of users reinforce the uniqueness of what they’re doing, and in the same way eBay redefined online shopping, Airbnb is redefining the way the world thinks about accommodations.”
Ashton Kutcher continues his expansion into all things internet, as it has just been announced that he has made a significant investment in travel startup Airbnb.
Airbnb is an online company that provides travelers the opportunity to ditch the hotel and stay in privately listed locations, from basic to extravagant. Users list their properties for rent and once travelers begin requesting their space, hosts have complete control on who they approve or deny. There is also a review system, for both host and lodger, built into the site. Airbnb has listings in over 8,000 cities and 166 countries across the world. They recently said that over 1.5 million nights have been booked using their service.
Airbnb announced the new partnership on their blog:
That’s right. It’s official. Ashton Kutcher – the man whose social media savvy made him a Twitter force to be reckoned with – has announced that he has made a significant investment in Airbnb and will be joining the team as a strategic advisor. The actor and angel investor’s love of science and technology is nothing new, but he has taken a fascination with tech to new heights with his avid approach to brand marketing and social media.
With Ashton on board, we’ll be working together to take our community engagement to the next level and expand our international presence to reach more people from different cultures all over the world. It’s an exciting time for us.
And if you’re looking to expand in the social market, you could pick worse guys to help you than Kutcher. His Twitter prowess is of legend, holding sway over nearly 7 million followers. Earlier this week he announced his own Twitter desktop app, powered by UberMedia called A+. The app carries some unique features but also allows Kutcher to promote his own projects and interests. It doesn’t take a professional prognosticator to see Airbnb integrated into his new Twitter app sometime in the near future.
Here’s what Kutcher said about Airbnb, as quoted in the NY Times:
“It’s moving social trust into commerce. Your home is a very private place, so building trust around turning that into a consumer offering is unlike any other site.”
Kutcher just signed a one-year contract to replace Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men, but it seems that he is devoting a lot of attention to the tech community these days. Kutcher has also invested in Flipboard and Path, among others.
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