Allow me to tell you a brilliant story that has made my day.
2 days ago, my wife (Angel) and I were looking at our calendar and realised we were approaching our first ever unhooked days, being a 3 day period stretching over the weekend. Given the high season is starting to ebb now, we didn’t expect this to book, so my wife was taking some time to tinker with the calendar....
Then she noticed something.
A little button popped up on Airbnb asking her to offer our home for free! Intrigued, she read further and found that Airbnb were asking all hosts in our region to assist the thousands of evacuees hit by wildfire in the Tasman region (next region over, by boat). She’d been watching the coverage of the fire all week but had no idea we could host evacuees through Airbnb.
She called out to me, we looked at the screen for 5 seconds then both said “no brainer” and clicked “list my home for free”. 3 clicks later and we were listed. We noticed 30 other hosts had also listed, which was great! After listing our home we were certain we would receive some evacuees the next morning.... but nothing happened.
Throughout the the course of the next day (yesterday) we waited... still nothing. We noticed that the number of hosts had grown from 30 to 86. Great, we thought!
But did people outside Airbnb know about it?
We watched the news coverage of the fires last night and saw nothing from civil defence saying they were using the Airbnb free homes thing... so we began to worry that nobody in the affected region knew about the site, or perhaps didn’t have any way to access it!
So my wife picked up the phone to 1 News, the main news station in NZ.
She thought about contacting Civil Defence directly but decided it was better to get the word out on a wider scale through the news room, plus ask them to get the information to the evacuation centres on the ground (where their reporters are).
An hour later, this news article appeared:
https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/airbnb-hosts-wellington-christchurch-offer-free-accommod...
I’m pretty proud of her right now. Since her 15 minute conversation with a news reporter the number of hosts has blown past 100+ and people are starting to get the help they need. Thousands more were evacuated last night as the fire continues to spread, so having this information up in the local news is essential.
Our place is an expensive boat ride away from the fire hit region, but we are still prepared for an evacuee booking today. But in the meantime, those closer to the region have come out in droves since the article went live last night and listed their homes up.
In the meantime, while we all continue to pray for rain over the Tasman, this morning I’m taking my beautiful wife out for breakfast 🙂
~ Ben