Hello everyone,
Thank you for all your feedback and replies, I would like to take this opportunity to address a few of the points raised here.
Everyone here at Airbnb is continuously working hard to address the many challenges we face as a growing company, that now works on a global scale. As you can imagine this comes with a wide range of challenges and difficulties that we have to work out. A lot of this is on a local scale in the many different countries we now operate in. Not to mention, on top of this, the variety of components on the Airbnb platform itself, which everyone uses and have to be continually addressed.
Chip has been diligently working for the past four years on the hospitality side of what Airbnb offers. He has been mainly working to see what we can all do to ensure for those people who do open up their homes on the platform, have a certain level of cleanliness, friendliness, reliability, that all go into creating a great all around experience.
Airbnb has been working together with both Hosts and Guests that use the platform right from the start, to make sure it is a service that both sides are equally happy to use and have a great experience on. The aim has always been to change the way in which we travel and stay abroad or more closer to home. To change the way we travel, where we stay, make connections and enable more enjoyable experiences all around.
Here Chip nor anyone else, is trying to tell you things you already know. We know that a lot of the host here in the Community are very knowledgeable and know how to host better than anyone. Some hosts are naturally good at this and others were great straight from the start, then through talking to other hosts they have been able to create an even better experience for their guests. The challenge here was how to help those thousands of hosts, who are new to this and don't necessarily know all the tricks to making a guest feel comfortable, to all create a great experience. Once that is better than staying in a hotel.
For Airbnb it is always a balancing act with the rules we put in place to enable hosts are able and happy to open up their homes, alongside encouraging people there is an alternative to using hotels as a place to go whenever they travel.
Of course Airbnb is used by a wide variety of people and Chip has been trying to help those people who do want or need more of a handhold in how best to open up their home to guests in a wide variety of cultures. This is no mean feat and I hope you’ll agree with me when I say that the overall platform experience for Hosts and Guests has greatly improved over the years and it’s because of that, that the concept of people using Airbnb as an alternative has become much more accepted in only a relatively short amount of time.
10 years ago, is would have been very hard to, one; rent out your house for short periods and find people who would take you up on that offer and two; find someone that would rent out their house for you to stay at and ensure they have the confidence that the place they’ve arrived at was of a certain standard and payment was make securely, protecting both the person renting and the person staying.
This has become a huge shift change in how we perceive hospitality and has given everyone a much greater freedom and choice in how we want to live our lives and travel.
Now of course we don’t always get it right, people don’t always act the way we expect them to behave and making something like this work at scale takes time to get right.
So yes, there are threads on this community where we talk about experiences that did not go to plan and that is regrettable, but as regrettable as that is the vast majority of stays through Airbnb work out fantastically well, as evidenced by all of the 5 star ratings you all are able to achieve. Plus, the many lovely comments that have also been shared here in the Community Center, which are often overlooked.
The questions you raise and the ideas and feedback you give are certainly looked at and discussed. And with this community the volume of all these has of course also increased dramatically and we are working on creating and setting up the right processes to deal with this volume and sharing with you our thoughts and feedback as well.
Again, this is not an easy thing to do when so much is coming at us, and we are still trying to change perceptions of Guests at the same time. We all need to ensure that Airbnb is at all times a great alternative to using hotels and making sure the use of this service is as comfortable, easy, reliable as booking a room somewhere else.
We are working on getting you all the answers to the questions you have raised and we are trying to address as many of them as we can as quickly as possible, in the Airbnb Open days, as well as here on our community. But, I hope you understand that addressing some of your questions or feedback can potentially have a big impact on how the service works, and that means we have to work out internally what that impact is before we give a definitive answer to these.
Many of the great ideas and feedback that has been raised through Host Voice are being looked at and considered but we need to make sure that when we feed back to you we don’t create more fluff, but are genuinely addressing them, whether or not we agree, so that you know we have really thought about it. Rather than giving placeholder answers and platitudes.
Although the main focus for this specific thread was more around the work Chip has delivered in creating the program of work to raise the average standard of hosting of the thousands of people that use Airbnb. So although I understand what has been raised here, I hope you can join me in wishing Chip all the best in his new role and future activities and appreciate the work he has put in to help us get to a level where people in general now see Airbnb as real alternative to hotels. 🙂
Thank you,
Lizzie
More specifically, @Robin4 you mention your misplaced a thread you created, is this what you are referring to link - you will also be able to view in your Community Profile. We will never remove a post, unless it breaks the guidelines and without further discussion with the original poster first. 🙂
@David126 and@Ange2, in terms of the Q&A Founder questions, please be assured I am still activily working on getting the responses back on the thread so it is still a very high priority to me.
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