Airbnb is rolling out a host of new benefits for hosts – TechCrunch

Airbnb has over 4 million hosts managing accommodations and experiences on its platform. Now, as he seeks to generate more bookings, he is looking for more. After introducing a major overhaul for customers earlier this year, Airbnb is now focused on improving the experience for new and existing hosts. Today, it’s launching new onboarding, payment features, and improved insurance tools.

Along with this, across North America it is also rolling out its previously announced anti-party technology to avoid disruptive reservations.

Airbnb’s moves follow its growth last quarter, but it does so amid plenty of tough headwinds for travel in general.

The world has gone from a pandemic to an economic crisis, and Airbnb has operated between that rock and the anvil. In 2020, it was one of the first big tech companies to reduce employees as he figured out how to operate his travel-dependent business during mass travel shutdowns and shelter-in-place orders. Now, it needs to think about ways to make its tools and services relevant to a market that may not want to spend money on the move for other reasons: to be more budget conscious.

With hosts and accommodations, Airbnb translates this into a pitch to make more money.

“Today, much like during the Great Recession in 2008, people are especially interested in earning extra income through hosting,” CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky told us in an interview. “That’s why we’re launching an easy way for millions of Airbnb people to call home.” (If this sounds familiar, it’s almost the same to his canned statement on his last earnings call…but we’re pretty sure we spoke to a real Brian Chesky.)

But it is not a perfect science: The last quarter the company said nights and experiences booked increased 25%, with gross book value up 31%. But existing hosts have complained about drop in reservations per host, partly due to the increase in the number of hosts and partly due to the economic situation in the world.

Overall, Airbnb’s goal seems to be: making hay while the sun is shining. That is, add hosts now while people want to try and earn some extra income, so the platform as a whole doesn’t run out of properties in the future, or face a supply constraint, as it is often described.

However, he dodged the question of what this means for Airbnb itself, particularly whether it will lay off or hire more people amid the current wave of job cuts, which has seen hundreds of thousands of laid-off tech workers among Airbnb peers.

“We have 6,000 employees and we generated $3.3 billion in free cash flow,” he said. “Over the past 12 months, we have generated nearly half a million dollars in free cash flow per employee. And we generate over $1 million in revenue per employee. So we are really skinny.

More information on the new features below:

Host accommodation

Launch of Airbnb a new workflow to easily integrate new hosts last year. It now adds a new feature to Airbnb Setup that matches new users with Superhosts to guide them through the setup and hosting process. Airbnb said 1,500 Superhosts — those who had at least 10 reservations or 100 nights booked, with a rating of 4.8 or higher — have registered so far to be “Ambassadors”. For context, Airbnb now has 980,000 active Superhosts; it will be interesting to see how many of them sign up.

New hosts who create a profile can contact specialist support via email, messages or video/audio chat – or now match with a nearby Superhost who has a similar property type. Superhosts can access listings to edit them directly.

Picture credits: Airbnb

Superhosts, it should be noted, don’t help out of the kindness of their hearts; they can expect a small increase in revenue, between $50 and $150 per host after the new host’s first guest leaves.

Host Protection

One of the driving factors in attracting hosts and hosting business to Airbnb is the issue of safeguards, both in terms of who books and what happens if things go wrong. The first of these is an adjustment, where new listing managers can now restrict initial availability to only experienced customers (someone with at least three reservations and no strikes against them), rather than checking after reservations.

At the same time, Airbnb is increasing the limit of AirCover – its damage protection program for hosts presented last year — from $1 million to $3 million. The new coverage will also cover damage to autos and boats, pets, and art and valuables like fine art, paintings, jewelry, and collectibles at an appraised value.

Picture credits: Airbnb

Payments

In addition to more features to help and protect hosts, Airbnb is also emphasizing the bottom line for hosts: which is how they get paid.

It introduces a new feature called Fast Pay in the US – developed by Airbnb itself – to disburse funds in less than 30 minutes to hosts who have registered a Visa or Mastercard payment method. The company charges a 1.5% fee with a cap of $15 at launch.

This method is much faster than other payment systems like bank accounts or PayPal, which can take anywhere from one to seven business days – and this seems to be an iteration on a test from years ago to pay some hosts half the money three days after clients book their property.

Airbnb already has built-in solutions to handle multiple currencies and payment methods, but Chesky said Airbnb wants to do more with payments.

“We are not a payment company but we manage nearly 400 billion dollars through our platform in 220 countries and 60 currencies. We hold billions of dollars of cash on deposit at all times,” he said. “We also have money transfer licenses in every state in the United States. Payments is one of Airbnb’s most underrated core competencies and I think we can do so much more.” He added that direct transfers to accounts, bypassing cards and therefore card fees, could be an area to explore.

The company is also considering better payment solutions in countries like India and Brazil, as well as other countries where it’s harder to get money in or out. When we asked if this could mean a future portfolio, Chesky replied that it was “something we are definitely considering.”

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