Thank you Emilie,
The worst part is they are messing with our business which for many of us is our livelihood. When Covid hit, so many people stepped up and offered their places for workers and did their part to give back. In the midst of what was happening around the world, Airbnb rose to meteoric success with a product in the right place at the right time, but they didn't do it alone; it was on the backs of hard-working hosts like myself.
My business pre covid was running a design and marketing firm, and my primary clientele were 5-star resorts; Four Seasons, Hyatt, Ritz Carlton, etc. As you know, the travel industry was decimated, but people picked up and did what they had to to survive. For us, that was sinking everything we had to create a special place on an old farm and run it like I'd seen for 25 years among my core clientele in the travel industry. Airbnb was different; they gave "Small" a chance to compete with "Big." We hosts were doing what we loved, we had hit our stride, and we were not just surviving but thriving, enjoying what we were doing and meeting wonderful guests along the way. We were stylists, photographers, marketers, and creative experience curators. Then Airbnb gets "Big," really big, and so it decides to feed that big ego, and like the hotel valet that parks the most expensive and sexiest sports car in the front of the hotel, Airbnb parked the best, sexiest of all listings front and center and we "Small" independent, hard-working hosts now relegated to the mire of stuff that was deemed not so special were floating around somewhere else, considered too dumb to be able to properly tag our listings with accurate locations or descriptions. Our hearts were broken because we foolishly thought Airbnb was different from Amazon, Facebook, and Google. We thought Airbnb saw us as people that couldn't be replaced by Ai and that they knew that without us, they'd have nothing; nothing that they actually created, crafted, curated, not a single calloused hand. 0 product, 0 experiences, 0 heart, 0 loyalty. Just 0.