by Lucie Greene
Attendees vary, from ardent Airbnb hosts who now use the platform as an income stream, to curious punters in search of contact with celebrity. There is laughter when Gwyneth Paltrow announces her latest travel-tips app G Spotting with a wink. There are tears as a cancer survivor talks about a transformative trip to Paris with a host, as part of the Make-A-Wish Foundation partnership (the talk’s title is “Building Empathy Through Community”). There are boos when a woman goes onstage to protest against Airbnb in Palestine. This is during Ashton Kutcher’s fireside chat with Brian Chesky in a session called “The Game Plan: Strategies for Entrepreneurs” (Kutcher is an investor in Airbnb). The protestor is promptly taken off stage by security as the crowd jeers. Kutcher seizes the moment to embark on a rousing speech about a world without borders and his belief in Chesky. An audience of smartphones records it.
Then there are the “experiences”—which are actually an Airbnb specialty. From the London Design Festival to Milan Design Week, Airbnb has used pop-up immersive “experiences” as a way to generate PR, communicate sophistication, and connect with artist communities in many cities.
One, in a South Broadway BNKR store, is a walk-through installation exploring different words associated with the concept of home. For hygge (the Danish term for mindful comfort and indulgence), visitors can have personalized tea bags made and sit in comfy armchairs. There are strange, cardboard bamboo-ish pods set up in another corner for fernweh, a German term for wanderlust. Here, visitors are encouraged to contribute their visions of faraway places in hand-painted journals. “Share your curiosities, your fantasies, or the adventures you envision ahead of you,” they are exhorted.
Suffice it to say, irony and humor, much less self-awareness, is in short supply. It’s all incredibly earnest. Why wouldn’t you want to sit in a tent, indoors, and journal with a crayon about that time you had a cup of tea near Ayers Rock?
The centerpiece of the event, from a press perspective, is the launch of Airbnb Trips, a move into branded travel experiences. It is a platform for bookable tours; the ability to make restaurant bookings is in the pipeline. Experiences for sale include stargazing, truffle hunting, social-good and charity projects, and cookery classes. They are led by Airbnb expert members and packaged with sleek, inspirational photography. Given the brand’s challenges with local legislators in numerous countries, it’s also a canny extension from home sharing into a less regulated arena. In addition, there are online lifestyle guides created entirely by community members to offer authentic local content. This is all part of a bigger move into 360-degree travel booking in the hopes that Airbnb can inch bigger ground away from traditional travel companies.
Another new app feature is curated travel content, described as Places. This includes travel guides penned by Airbnb members about local hotspots and audio walking tours. There are local “meet-ups” on offer, connecting travelers to events that are running when they are visiting.
In addition, Airbnb is enhancing the service aspect of its offer—in the future its Homes section will allow people to pre-order groceries and book rental cars, not just reserve accommodations. It is all part of Airbnb’s grand plan to make itself a one-stop, authentic travel shop for social media–savvy, upwardly mobile young people.
The event culminates in the Bélo Awards ceremony, compèred by TV host and comic James Corden. It celebrates the “brightest and best of the Airbnb community” by championing “their stories of playful creativity, limitless care, and unexpected heroism.” After this there’s a concert headlined by Maroon 5.
Sermons of Authenticity
There’s a religious feel to Airbnb Open 2016. Key words such as “community” and “authenticity” are peppered through every talk. Upbeat music pumps everywhere like audio Prozac.
There is also an underlying tone that the traditional hotel industry is prosaic, sterile, and only out to turn a profit. The implication is that anyone who doesn’t want a more “personal” experience is somehow lacking and will never truly experience cities, that staying in a traditional hotel can in no way give guests the kind of immersion into a place that staying with someone local does. And it’s all about authentic experiences, of course. Why would you want to stay in the boxy room of a faceless hotel, not getting to know the area or the culture? What compares to getting to know your host, going on journeys, eating with his family? Pity the fool for whom the guarantee of clean sheets, mini-bar, and clean carpet is appealing, or the idiot who’d prefer to passively consume an episode of The Bachelor and order room service than talk to a stranger. In Airbnb world, we should be constantly experiencing, connecting, and living authentically. It’s an incredibly clever form of messaging, even if it does belie a reality that not everyone wants true immersion when they travel. And many of the experiences at Airbnb, thanks to professional Airbnb-ers and their now massive membership, aren’t that different from a hotel or traditional home-rental platform—they are whole-property rentals so there’s no fireside chats with owners occurring. And it’s not even that affordable anymore in many cities. It’s not so special, for all the spin.
The Kutcher protest scene isn’t the only area of unrest. During the event, labor union members and affordable-housing advocates stage a rally calling for tougher regulations for short-term rentals. They contend that owners are repurposing affordable housing units, listing them on Airbnb and other such sites, shrinking the housing supply and distorting rents. (New York and San Francisco are among cities starting to clamp down on Airbnb for this reason. Airbnb has recently agreed to collect taxes from tenants in Los Angeles and pay these to the city.)
There’s also a small, ragtag troop—presumably unrelated—marching and shouting about Donald Trump and his attitude toward immigrants. They march around the Airbnb blocks with drums and horns, chanting. It all contributes to a slight air of tension as the event progresses.
The politics don’t end there. One of the items on the agenda is championing Airbnb’s position in policy. Airbnb, like many growing tech companies who encounter restrictive legislation, has hired a head of policy, in this case Chris Lehane, formerly a White House spokesperson during the Clinton/Gore administration. During his talk, “The Making of a Movement for Home Sharing,” he discusses how the sharing economy is not only good for the community but also a sustainable way to travel. “A year ago, I was in Paris and together we formally launched a movement, a home-sharing project,” says Lehane. “And today as I stand here I can say that the state of the movement is strong and is getting stronger. And that this really attributes to you—you are the heart and soul of what makes us strong.”
If Airbnb cofounder Gebbia, clad in a fitted T-shirt and jeans, is the rock star of the event, Lehane is the pastor. Lehane’s speech positions Airbnb for the future, arguing that major consumer trends mean it will only become more popular. Airbnb has “democratized travel,” opened up new areas to tourism, and is—now, finally—providing tax revenue to governments.
However, this isn’t entirely true. As the Guardian noted in December 2016, Airbnb Payments UK Ltd handles the company’s rental payments from everywhere in the world other than the U.S., China, and India. The commissions on these payments pass through Ireland, which allows Airbnb to benefit from friendlier corporation tax. The Guardian said Airbnb paid UK tax of just £317,000 in the eleven months to December 2015, despite handling hundreds of millions of pounds in global rent payments that generated commissions for its Irish operations.
Lehane argues that Airbnb also helps the environment, because it’s a more sustainable way to travel. “Millennials care more about sustainability issues and climate change than baby boomers, and that manifests itself in how they live their daily lives,” he says. “You see shared bikes, shared gardens, shared tools, shared everything on energy distribution. We even have shared pets in some places. Think about it from the perspective of home sharers. Right now, in the United States alone, there are over 13 million empty homes and over 33 million empty be
drooms.”
The services of Airbnb will also save the ailing middle class as its incomes shrink: “A typical middle-class family has fallen behind by about $7,000 from where they would have been otherwise,” Lehane says.
This positions the democratization of travel and the sharing economy as an engine for economic growth. “When you look at tourism and travel, it’s almost 10 percent of the global GDP. That’s an enormous figure. And you’ve got Chinese travel coming behind us, and that will continue to accelerate that growth.” The sharing economy, Lehane says, is “about a $15 billion-a-year business but is projected to grow to $335 billion over the next ten years or so. There’s a really simple reason why this growth is taking place. People really, really, really like it. It’s easy, it’s affordable, it connects them, and it’s very consistent with their sustainability beliefs and values.”
Despite claims of being more sustainable, this increased travel demand, even if users are staying in other people’s apartments, inevitably increases usage of cars, planes, and trains.
Nevertheless, Airbnb is already mobilizing its membership to push its agenda. It’s launched Airbnb Citizen, a separate website “advancing home sharing as a solution” as well as being a global movement with news on policy updates. “As our community grows,” the company proclaims on its website, “we appreciate the opportunity to work with local governments to craft progressive, fair rules for home sharing. With this in mind, we are releasing the Airbnb Policy Tool Chest, a resource for governments to consider as they draft or amend these rules.” The company has also announced approval of Airbnb clubs, support groups, and focal points for local hosts to gather. Described by Airbnb as independent, these branded, sharing organizations now number one hundred globally.
Lehane frames sharing economy hosts as a new employment group, a new digital iteration to previous centuries’ craftsmen and artisans who came together and created guilds, and who the government has simply been behind in recognizing. “In the Industrial Age, working men and women organized themselves into trade unions, and I fundamentally believe that as we enter this age of a sharing economy, clubs are the next iteration of people organizing themselves, to represent themselves, advocate for themselves.”
“Building Empathy”
All things considered, while bizarre in places, Airbnb Open is a masterpiece in immersion and onboarding (a term that means familiarizing potential customers with the brand). One of its key methods is in controlling the dialogue and messaging. Everything is tightly focused and planned. But for anyone with an ounce of cynicism, holes quickly appear. That’s the fallacy in having a branded rather than an editorially led conference, similar to those staged by the Economist, New York Times, and Financial Times, which are largely brand agnostic. Brands sponsor newspaper conferences too, but journalists and moderators are relatively free to grill, challenge, and discuss topics with guests. The audience is made up of informed critics, rather than middle-America evangelicals looking at ways to supplement their incomes. Airbnb Open is not a dialogue; everyone is singing in unison. One by one, all the criticisms of Airbnb’s platform are addressed with soaring speeches, keynotes, and data—it’s a one-way broadcast rather than a discussion. Panels such as “Working Together with the Travel Industry” and “Building Relationships with Landlords and Neighbors” address hot-button issues only on its terms, but everything is extremely and disconcertingly cordial—a world away from the reality of actual debates on these important topics, in which an entire industry is being disrupted by a platform that is distorting rents. In the minds of the audience, however, when they exit the matter is resolved, which is potentially dangerous as Airbnb blasts similar messaging to its several million users. Attendees at In Goop Health would likely experience the same evangelism about well-being (without those grumpy doctors who have criticized some of its more wacky recommendations). But the difference is that Goop is selling jade eggs and face cream, not encouraging people to flout legislation by renting properties illegally.
In many ways Airbnb Open reflects the dissonances in the impact of Silicon Valley’s ongoing rise. Not least is the location choice. Staging the event in one of L.A.’s hottest new neighborhoods seems apposite but takes little account of the fact that this is the heart of the city’s homeless population, who may face being uprooted as the new wave of more affluent residents move in. Gwyneth Paltrow references authentic downtown L.A. eateries. Yet, step outside the actual theater, and the area is a portrait of the economic disparity so prevalent in the U.S. The neighborhood is in transition, becoming a gentrified millennial enclave. Half the jewelry shops and textile warehouses won’t be here in five years. In the same way that the West Village in New York was adored for its small boutiques and antique shops and cafés, the influx of wealth has put rents way above affordability and forced most tenants to depart. Now the stores are empty. Ironically, what makes Downtown L.A. so seductively authentic and interesting might vanish with its ascent.
The talks about Airbnb creating empathy, while laden in Goop-ish sunshine, stand in uncomfortable contrast to the security guards on a number of corners to marshal local homeless people. (If Pishevar wants to flatten the cities and terraform them, Airbnb wants to paste a Polaroid filter over the best parts, keep the local taco stands, and sweep out the undesirables.)
In 2016, Airbnb donated $100,000 to a project working on the homeless issue in L.A., which seems relatively meager for a company valued at $30 billion. In 2017, it also launched Open Homes, a platform allowing anyone to register vacant spaces for people in need such as displaced citizens or those forced to move due to natural disasters. It contributes to the feeling that while dwindling communities in cherry blossom–bedecked Yoshino in Japan are picture-book problems to solve, issues of rising homelessness in states such as California are not. And therefore, they are not part of Airbnb’s marketing platform.
One block from the main thoroughfare of theaters where Airbnb Open speeches are held, the dense smell of urine is overwhelming. Despite the international emphasis of the event—seeing new cultures in far-off lands, democratizing travel—it is attended almost exclusively by white, middle-income Americans. They no doubt see it as a lifeline, or a lucrative income stream, but overall the demographic of the audience feels quite narrow. Like a convention of small businesses that wouldn’t look out of place in a conference room in Las Vegas.
In its broadcast nature, Airbnb Open is also emblematic of Silicon Valley’s approach to critique. Much is made of the journalistic interview on the final day of the event, in which Airbnb’s founders face “tough questions,” which are all pre-planned, presumably pre-approved, and without recourse and interrogation. (“He says he didn’t do it.” “OK, great!”)
Airbnb, as a bastion of the Sharing Economy, is also positioned as the symbol of future and progress. Governments trying to hold it back are backward and are stopping people from traveling affordably or earning a little money during challenging times. Some of that might be true, but Airbnb lauding itself as a civic leader and champion of the people certainly isn’t. It’s a company.
Airbnb adopts a very worldly, internationalist rhetoric, and this is a message throughout. Audiences are presented as travel-hungry, intrepid explorers of the world, collecting life-changing memories while enriching their lives. But there is a disconnect here, too. It’s a worldliness in the context of the exoticism of travel for affluent millennials visiting new places for leisure. It’s not about true diversity, at least not at home where its audience is mainly white. And certainly not within its own company.
The uncomfortable truth is that often, in reality, its audience is not diverse, as evidenced in news reports of host racism. This is backed by a recent Harvard Business School study, “Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment.” Released in September 2016, the paper found significant bias occurring in booking requests from certain potential renters. It opens with the following abstract: “In a field experime
nt on Airbnb, we find that applications from guests with distinctively African American names are 16 percent less likely to be accepted relative to identical guests with distinctively white names. Discrimination occurs among landlords of all sizes, including small landlords sharing the property and larger landlords with multiple properties. Discrimination is most pronounced among hosts who have never had an African American guest, suggesting only a subset of hosts discriminate. While rental markets have achieved significant reductions in discrimination in recent decades, our results suggest that Airbnb’s current design choices facilitate discrimination and raise the possibility of erasing some of these civil rights gains.”
Airbnb has many progressive initiatives in place, including platforms for hosts to house refugees from Kenya to Rwanda and other areas embroiled in the global refugee crisis. It has taken reports of racism among its hosts seriously, instituting polices that will punish hosts for discrimination based on race, sexual orientation, or gender identity. Each time they are criticized, its founders respond thoughtfully and with more authenticity than neighboring Silicon Valley giants. “I think they’ve actually done a really phenomenal job. Every time there is an issue, they use that to make the company better,” says Margit Wennmachers, pointing to research and to the philanthropic efforts of the company.
With housing shortages in many parts of the world, Airbnb is reacting to pressure over controlling the lengths of stays. In response to criticism about the removal of properties from the traditional rental market so that they can be listed on Airbnb, it recently announced it would help enforce a ninety-day rule, which prohibits short-term lettings of entire properties for more than ninety days in a calendar year.
In response to the Muslim travel ban by President Trump, its founders have been vociferous about inclusivity being at the core of its values. It offered housing to anyone impacted by the ban and launched the ad campaign #WeAccept, touting its principles of accepting people of different ethnicities, sexual orientations, and backgrounds. It revived this in the wake of Trump’s statements about “shithole” countries, referring to immigrants coming from African nations, with a digital ad campaign promoting listings in the same countries and with the same hashtag. But that could be seen as much as a smart way to connect with its millennial audience (which statistically skews more liberal) as much as altruism.