Two friends in a shared apartment in San Francisco, high rents and a conference that takes up all the hotel rooms. It was obvious: To earn extra money for the rent, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia offered three people an air mattress and breakfast in their apartment. After founding “Air Bed and Breakfast” in 2007, it became Airbnb two years later. Airbnb’s offering has expanded from individual rooms to entire apartments and houses. Almost a decade later, people had set foot in an Airbnb some 300 million times.
And then came the pandemic. “At the end of January, we realized that our China business had dropped by 80 percent in just a few weeks,” Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky recalled in the podcast decoder from The Verge.
The travel industry in particular was hit hard by the corona pandemic – and is still bleeding. However, after dramatic headlines surrounding the existence of the platform at the beginning of the pandemic, the company was able to pull itself together again.
However, Chesky isn’t just predicting that the globetrotting industry will recover
but also the advent of completely new travel habits that could change the industry from the ground up. “The world is witnessing a revolution in the way we live and work. The pandemic has suddenly freed millions of people from the need to go to an office,” the CEO said in the call to announce Q3 results.
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Equipped with an internet connection, we can move our office to any location, regardless of national borders. It doesn’t really matter whether that’s in a small wooden hut in the Swiss Alps or even in the royal city palace of Jaipur, which can be booked via Airbnb. All these changes had to be taken into account within Airbnb and new structures had to be created in order not to fall by the wayside.
The accommodation platform was no longer just a means to the end of holiday booking, but rather part of the new everyday working life. To respond to the revolution in the travel, work and housing sectors, the CEO took to Twitter to know what his followers would like for the company “if Airbnb could launch something in 2022”.
Out of a total of 4,000 responses, the top suggestion was to integrate cryptocurrency payments into the platform. At the same time, the Airbnb founder made it clear that cryptocurrencies mean a variety of token ideas. So are there several different cryptocurrencies in the room?
This idea is not entirely foreign to the company. Even before the IPO, Airbnb gave a glimpse into the possible future. The IPO application to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) states that the future success of the platform will depend, among other things, on the ability to adapt to new technologies such as “tokenization, cryptocurrencies, new authentication technologies such as biometrics, distributed ledger and to adapt blockchain technologies, artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality and cloud technologies”.
Against this background, it seems inappropriate to label Airbnb’s crypto integration as a Twitter gimmick. In fact, the company had had its sights set on decentralized technologies for a long time. Chesky also revealed to The Verge that the company is definitely investigating the issue. “Like the revolution in travel, there is a revolution happening in the crypto economy,” said the CEO.
Airbnb payments
Airbnb told BTC-ECHO that the company is reviewing “a number of updates” to the service. “Airbnb Payments is a unique benefit to Airbnb that is fundamental to our guests’ and hosts’ trust in our business and our growth, and we’ve processed $336 billion in payments since 2013,” according to the platform. Airbnb has a bespoke, integrated payment system that allows payments between hosts and guests in over 40 currencies. The payment system tailored to Airbnb and the flexibility that comes with it make future updates and the development of new processes quite easy. Against the background that around 93 percent of Airbnb hosts are currently paid in their local currency, the integration appears to be worthwhile
of cryptocurrencies to be obvious.
As tokens that can be sent across national borders, crypto payments would make the conversion of individual currencies for international bookings obsolete. When asked if the planned “updates” really do include the integration of cryptocurrency payments, Airbnb did not disclose any information and declined to comment further on the matter.
Overall, Airbnb seems to be dealing intensively with the topic of cryptocurrencies. What exactly we can expect from the company can currently only be guessed at. One thing is for sure though: Chesky understands the importance of crypto. However, his interest does not (yet) seem to reach into the Metaverse.
Airbnb in the Metaverse?
Reports of people spending thousands upon thousands of dollars on virtual lots, mansions, or luxury yachts on Decentraland, Axie Infinity, or other Metaverse platforms are piling up. Travel restrictions that certain countries and regions had imposed due to the corona pandemic are certainly playing their part. Actually ideal conditions for an advance of Airbnb into the Metaverse, one might think.
However, it seems that the CEO is holding back his enthusiasm. In an interview with Rafat Ali, Skift’s founder and CEO, Chesky explained that the digital revolution poses a great risk. “We live in one of the loneliest times in human history,” said the Airbnb boss.
However, if you take physical communities and “atomize” them, i.e. digitize them, they would lose a lot of their “nourishment”, according to Chesky. That doesn’t sound like VR enthusiasm. The Airbnb boss also has an opinion on Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the Metaverse. So while he believes the internet will definitely become more “immersive,” he questions whether it can replace real life or just the two-dimensional web.
The basic idea of Airbnb goes back to the human community in the physical world. “This notion of human connection and the risk that the world is isolated, lonely and divided – if Airbnb has a reason for being (…) it is its ability to bring people from all cultures of the world together in the physical world,” explained Chesky into decoders. “That will always be relevant as long as people are relevant in this world.”
Disclaimer
The article has been editorially revised and first appeared in the February issue of BTC-ECHO Magazine.
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