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When you welcome guests to stay in your space, it’s essential that they respect your home, follow your house rules, co...
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Caption: Airbnb co-founders Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk attended the party to congratulate the 12 Superhosts and their guests in person.
Achieving Superhost status is an incredible achievement, one that represents standout hospitality, responsiveness, and attention to detail. Meeting that high bar is a huge win. Continuing to meet that high bar is even more impressive.
In fact, fewer than 4,000 people have maintained consecutive Superhost status since the program was introduced five years ago. That’s some 60 months of zero cancellations and five-star reviews. At Airbnb, we decided that merited a party.
In March, we invited 12 of the most tenured Superhosts to Airbnb headquarters in San Francisco, California, to celebrate their hosting success. A sign greeted them at the event: “You’ve hosted the world. Now it’s time for us to host you.” That says it all!
Take a look at some photos of the party, below, and stay tuned—this event was so much fun, we plan to host more Superhost celebrations in the future. In the meantime, thank you to all of you who are Superhosts.
Johanna gave out Superhost pins and nametags and led the group on a tour of Airbnb headquarters, which includes meeting and conference rooms modeled after actual listings. Johanna was the perfect person to act as tour guide: She and her husband, Gian, are Superhosts themselves, and they first met when Joh was a guest at Gian’s home in Italy 7 years ago.
Caption: Superhost Kitty stands outside her home away from home.
Does this look familiar? Superhost Kitty and her husband joined hands above a replica of their Airbnb listing, a “mushroom dome” cabin in California, on the fourth floor of Airbnb’s San Francisco headquarters.
Caption: Co-founder & CPO Joe Gebbia; Co-founder, CEO, and Head of Community Brian Chesky; Superhost Mary Sledd; and Co-founder, CSO, and Chairman of Airbnb China Nathan Blecharczyk.
All three of Airbnb’s co-founders joined the event to congratulate and thank the Superhosts.
Caption: A Superhost with her customized guest book.
The Superhosts received personalized guest books as a gift and thank you.
Caption: Superhost Janna (left), receives her customized guest book from Airbnb’s Laura Chambers, who leads the team that looks after homes hosts and Superhosts.
Caption: Superhost Ash shows his personalized guest book to Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia and other guests.
We've been hosting since 2009, airbnb's first year, and have been superhosts since the program's inception. (Well, not counting the first iteration of the superhost program, which was by application only. We did not apply, because acceptance "earned" the right to serve as an unpaid consultant to other hosts... It seemed like a lose-lose proposition. I'm all about the community, but applying for an opportunity to train our competition for free just didn't make sense!)
I think we were invited to this party, but we were away and couldn't attend. Just yesterday, I received my "20 time superhost" award in the mail. It was not a personalized guestbook (which at least would have been useful for our future guests, and might have eventually held some cherished notes...) but rather a chintzy keychain and gold key, with a large metal stand on which to mount it. My best description: a shoebox full of future landfill.
I would have preferred the guest book to the gold key, but I'll echo a previous commenter, who asked for something truly useful, like health insurance! Or, for that matter, maybe just focus on making everything work better for Hosts. (Example: When uploading photos to the Community Center forum, why does the software rotate my photo 90 degrees??? Or, Example #2: When messaging guests on an iPhone, give us more than a one line field of visible text, so we can actually see what we've written (or dictated) without having to scroll up and down. That one is maddening!)
I'm appreciative of all the opportunities airbnb has given us, both as hosts and as guests, but I wish they were more focused on working to improve things for the airbnb community, rather than standing back and clapping - for us and for themselves.
