Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, believes that the main reason many customers prefer hotels to his platform is the risk of unexpected surprises. He acknowledges that sometimes accommodation does not live up to expectations. “It can be hard to know what you’re going to get,” he explains. For this reason, the company, which has already made previous efforts to verify the advertisements, is launching three new features today: a collection of the most reliable accommodations; a new design of recommendations and evaluations, and new tools so that hosts can provide more complete information about what they offer.
Dressed in a black t-shirt and pants and with white sneakers, Chesky presented the news this Tuesday at an event to which Airbnb invited international media, including EL PAÍS. With his two dogs, Sandy and Sophie, as occasional companions, the 42-year-old Airbnb boss stuck to talking about the product. Although the event was held in New York, he avoided mentioning the new regulation that came into force in September and which in practice has meant a veto for the platform in the city of skyscrapers. He did defend that his accommodations continue to be an economic alternative to hotels and that in the last year, their prices have risen 1%, compared to 10% for hotels.
With user ratings and customer service information, the platform has created a badge, “Traveller Recommendations,” which it currently grants to two of the seven million accommodations it has listed. That’s the first news. “They are a collection of the most appreciated houses on Airbnb. This is based on ratings, reviews and reliability. They are incredible homes. They have an average rating of 4.92 [sobre 5], really high, and they must have a minimum of five ratings. The host’s cancellation rate should be on average only 1% and the incident rate should be less than 1%,” explained Chesky, who highlighted the large number of accommodations that pass that bar. “Let’s put this in perspective. Hilton Hotels, one of the world’s largest chains, has about 1.1 million rooms worldwide. So the ‘Traveller Recommendations’ accommodations are almost double the rooms that Hilton has worldwide,” he said.
In parallel, Airbnb has changed the design of reviews and evaluations. Guests have already left more than 371 million reviews about their stays on Airbnb, but the data shown until now was limited, and guests struggled to find the information that matters most to them for their travel plans. Therefore, three new functions have been created to make this section much more useful and easier to read. One is the classification of evaluations, which can now be sorted by date or rating. Another is the distribution of ratings: a new graph that makes it easy to get a quick idea of the ratings users have left. And third, more complete evaluations that include more information about the guest and their stay, for example, where they are from, how long they stayed in the accommodation and whether they were traveling with their family, their pet or a group.
New ads tab
Chesky illustrated those improvements with some examples, before moving on to the third new feature: the new ads tab. He introduces new tools to make it easier for hosts to provide complete and reliable information about accommodation. That benefits both parties, Airbnb maintains, because listings with more details receive more bookings and because customers know better what they are renting.
The founder of Airbnb has his San Francisco home on the platform, so he showed his own listing in to highlight the star novelty of the new listings tab: a photo tour created with an artificial intelligence engine developed by Airbnb, in which Images are organized by room automatically so that guests get an idea of the layout of the space. In addition, the new ad editor makes it easy to provide additional and detailed information about the accommodation and included services.
Along with that, hosts will be able to connect their smart locks to their Airbnb account and automatically generate a unique access code for each reservation that serves during a certain period. Guests receive the code through the Airbnb app just before arriving. This novelty, compatible with Schlage, August and Yale brand locks, will begin to be applied at the end of the year, but for now only in the United States and Canada.
Airbnb is also introducing other minor updates for hosts around visibility and price comparison, a new dashboard with income information, and tools for commissions and communications. “We have made hosting so much easier that I think more and more people will do it. The easier it is, the more people will do it,” Chesky concluded.
The firm founded in 2008 by Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia had its dark year during the pandemic, but it recovered strongly and in 2022 earned $1,892 million, the first profits in its history in a full year, after growing by 40 % in revenue, up to 8,399 million dollars. This year it is growing strongly in revenues and profits and closed a record third quarter in which its revenues grew by 18%, to $3,397 million and profits soared.
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