Airbnb's company blog, with announcements on branding, trust and safety, marketplace engineering, and milestones from its early startup days.
HN commenters mostly cite it for the rebrand around 'belonging' and new features, and note it still runs on Posterous; one post is a hiring pitch.
Have you used AirBnB yet? I just did a few weeks ago for the first time, and am about to again when I move up to the Bay Area.
It's amazing. Not only do they identify unused physical assets (extra space in people's homes/apts.) and create a market for it that undercuts an entire industry, they've created this amazing karmic serendipity of meeting new and interesting people from the very first moment you touch down.
Travel isn't just about seeing landmarks and whatnot, it's about immersing yourself in the local culture, and AirBnB provides that much better than most hotels can.
Combine the feel-good nature of the service with its recession/depression/financial-crisis/money-saving friendly, disruptive undercutting of a huge industry and I have no doubt they'll eventually be among the biggest incubator successes or exits.
And yes, they are growing:
http://blog.airbnb.com/airbnb-celebrates-1000000-nights-booked
I do wonder if they'll compete with Couchsurfing.com. The latter could pivot a little and offer the same kind of for-pay service AirBnB does, and already has a huge clientel.
Edit: just to elaborate on the recession-friendly bit. I've gotten very interested lately in companies like AirBnB and Groupon that enable people to continue spending despite adverse financial conditions, be it deflationary or inflationary. In the former, cash and credit becomes scarce, and in the latter cash loses its value and prices increase.
In either case, AirBnB has found an asset…
> In the past year, only about 340 units in SF were rented on Airbnb more than 211 nights ...
For the purposes of Prop F, statistics that seem more relevant are
- how many units are rented more than 90 nights (the current law) [1]
- how many units are rented more than 75 nights (as proposed by Prop F)
When I see AirBnB supporters focusing on a number that doesn't seems as relevant, it feels like spin to me.
> The median number of trips per unit was 5, and mean was 13.3.
Interesting shift here to talking about trips per unit, rather than nights per unit. Back in 2012, the average stay was 5.5 days [2]. So does that mean that the average number of days per unit is 71.5 (5.5 * 13)?
Also, according to the Chronicle [3], out of the 5,459 listings in 2015, "205 hosts have three or more listings. These super hosts account for 4.8 percent of all hosts, but control 993 properties — 18.2 percent of Airbnb’s local listings." I didn't see anything in Sam's post or the other anti-Prop F posts that discusses this.
[1] http://www.cnet.com/news/san-francisco-board-of-supervisors-vote-on-airbnb/
[2] http://blog.airbnb.com/economic-impact-airbnb/
[3] http://www.sfchronicle.com/airbnb-impact-san-francisco-2015/#1
... Travel is one of the most elastic industries. Entire theme parks here in Orlando close down during the summer because travel always dips.
What I'm saying is that AirBnB is not a large enough factor to impact the overall market size.
For a quick snap shot, I looked up number of American's that AAA predicts will travel on the 4th of July ever year. In 2011 the number was 39M[1], in 2016 it was 43M[2]. Not really that big of a difference. AirBnB does make travel more attainable for the non-traditional worker[3] (such as students), but students won't rapidly expand an industry.
[1]http://newsroom.aaa.com/tag/independence-day-travel-forecast/
[2]http://newsroom.aaa.com/2016/06/aaa-americans-will-take-trips-ever-independence-day-weekend/
[3]http://blog.airbnb.com/economic-impact-airbnb/?_ga=1.115674822.1940512795.1462906962#new-york
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Joining Twitter as employee #301 not early enough for you?
Come join our engineering team at Airbnb. We're 6 engineers, you can be engineer #7.
If you're interested in a front-end role, you can be front-end engineer #2!
We're building an engineering team that can produce what teams 10 times our size can do. We love what we're building. We talk about product daily, how we can enrich the experience of our users further. We love working on challenging problems and working with smart engineers that can help us grow individually too. Most of all, we value engineering.
Check out some of the challenges we're working on: http://blog.airbnb.com/hard-problems-big-opportunity
Email me at barry@airbnb.com if you'd like to chat and hear more.
This was just posted today: http://blog.airbnb.com/our-commitment-to-trust-and-safety
In particular:
"With regards to EJ, we let her down, and for that we are very sorry. We should have responded faster, communicated more sensitively, and taken more decisive action to make sure she felt safe and secure. But we weren’t prepared for the crisis and we dropped the ball. Now we’re dealing with the consequences. In working with the San Francisco Police Department, we are happy to say a suspect is now in custody. Even so, we realize that we have disappointed the community. To EJ, and all the other hosts who have had bad experiences, we know you deserve better from us."
Looks like I wasn't so lame after all in taking some lessons learned. If AirBnB can learn some "obvious" lessons from this incident, so can I... and you.
Frankly I did not see this coming [0], I always figured Airbnb would aim to be a universal marketplace, rather than carving out a niche in "authentic", "unique", "truly amazing experiences".
Anyhow, I read "belonging" as a coded word for "community", and wonder how Airbnb thinks they are going to culture their own community...
Maybe they will make a strategic acquisition? Lonely Planet, for example.
Or maybe they will bleed some of their profits into a virtual currency / karma that folks can earn, trade, and apply toward accommodations? Airbnb could tweak the karma economy to maximize profits while still infusing enough karma to bootstrap their community.
[0] http://blog.airbnb.com/belong-anywhere