News

Airbnb plans total travel experience

Airbnb founder Brian Chesky has decided that the company will become a full-blown hospitality brand, one that delivers a seamless end-to-end experience when its customers travel.
“Our business isn’t [renting] the house,” Mr Chesky says. “Our business is the entire trip.”

His idea is to create a portfolio of new services that make the Airbnb experience more consistent from stay to stay and can generate lots and lots of additional revenue. One starting point: a cleaning service that will offer fresh sheets and towels to Airbnb proprietors. Using bed count as a basis, Airbnb is already the fifth-largest hotelier in the world, with unparalleled global reach: Airbnb has a presence in nearly every country on earth, something no hotel chain can match. Airbnb -expects to have 1 million listings by the end of 2014.

Achieving “a seamless end-to-end experience” may not be so easy. The need to have a standard for airport transfers through to the quality of bathroom amenities for 550,000 disparate properties in 192 countries without spoiling the unique host experience raises plenty of hurdles. To aid in the development, Mr Chesky has engaged Chip Conley, who claims to have introduced the boutique-hotel aesthetic. In 1987, Conley, a then-26-year-old Stanford business-school graduate with no hotel experience, raised $1 million to purchase and reinvent a 1950s-era ¬motor lodge in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Using the Phoenix as a model, Mr Conley created more than 50 other unique experiences, mostly in the Bay area, under the umbrella of his Joie de Vivre brand.

Mr Chesky’s first directive to Mr Conley was to create a set of hospitality standards that could make the Airbnb guest experience more reliable. The aim was to figure out which baseline comforts Airbnb ought to offer guests, while embracing the unique, local, and often unpredictable charms its hosts provide on their own. In November, Conley rolled out nine such standards for hosts to follow. Some, like pledging that a listing is accurate, are pretty general. But others specifically address cleanliness and appropriate ways to interact with guests.

Airbnb even built out a “hospitality lab” in Dublin, where users can get free training on standards and where the company can learn from seeing hosts and guests together in a physical space. In response to the constant complaint that Airbnb hosts are too slow to respond to inquiries, Airbnb made it easier for them to approve booking requests via its mobile apps. Previously those management features mostly lived on Airbnb’s website. In an effort to make an Airbnb listing as easy to book as a hotel room, Chesky and Conley have ramped up “instant booking” that enables guests to “book someone’s room with the click of a button”, says Mr Chesky. More than 41,000 properties already offer the service and Mr Chesky’s ultimate goal is to make every listing instantly bookable.

Related Articles

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Back to top button
WP Tumblr Auto Publish Powered By : XYZScripts.com
AccomNews
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x