Without owning any
traditional travel agencies or retail stores, Airbnb has achieved to become a
leader of the sharing economy in the accommodation sector. How can a company
upset the rules of the traditional hotel industry in such a short time without
having any point of sale? Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk, the
three Airbnb co-founders tried to stake everything on the information
technology: risky bet but one which paid off! They were perfectly aware of how
decisive the use of IT is nowadays in every company’s life cycle. Furthermore,
they fully unsderstood that with their world-changing vision and innovative
idea, IT had to be at the heart of their strategy to lead Airbnb to a great
success.
First, let’s talk about one
of the co-founders’ main sources of inspiration: the design. As two out of
three co-founders were designers, they focused their efforts on a well designed
website by paying attention to every little detail and by emphasizing on visual
sensitivity and appeal. Their goal was to create the most appealing design to
an audience as large as possible at lower costs. Even though the task was not
easy, it seems like it has paid off since the website’s great design made
Airbnb famous and prosperous very quickly.
Visual appeal is in fact
decisive but not exclusive. Airbnb’s co-founders understood that the profound
simplicity in the user experience as well as the user friendliness of the
website were key factors in the success of their innovation. The simplicity of
the booking process being a top priority, engineers established filters to list
a variety of attributes and categorize different criteria to respond to
customers’ needs. They also had the famous idea to build a « sophisticated
search algorithm », which enables to determine location relevance thanks
to a specific model: guests can find out the degree to which the accommodations
fit their preferences.
Location is
another crucial element in Airbnb ’s IT efforts. An AirMapView open
source framework has been developed in order to help Airbnb’s users figure out
where to stay. A new internal tool for users has been launched to understand
locations and their relationships to other locations. How does one know where
the perfect place to stay is if they have never been on the spot? Airbnb
tackles this issue with AT-AT. The principle is simple: capturing location data
to inform guests of the trendy areas to stay in, by building machine learning
algorithms to analyse reviews, listing descriptions and by creating search
patterns to lead guests towards recommendations.
Kate Abrosimova, author of the article, outlines the safety whether it refers to private messaging, reviews and references, social connections, guarantee of hosts’ identity or pictures truthfulness and mostly payment process. From the very start, Airbnb adopted a well known and secured payment system, called Braintree, which enables much more payment possibilities than what the existing payment systems allow. Isn’t it one of the most important elements for anyone processing a payment online? Even more when everyone knows that Airbnb is used worldwide, in 190 countries that use different currencies?
Kate Abrosimova, author of the article, outlines the safety whether it refers to private messaging, reviews and references, social connections, guarantee of hosts’ identity or pictures truthfulness and mostly payment process. From the very start, Airbnb adopted a well known and secured payment system, called Braintree, which enables much more payment possibilities than what the existing payment systems allow. Isn’t it one of the most important elements for anyone processing a payment online? Even more when everyone knows that Airbnb is used worldwide, in 190 countries that use different currencies?
By creating an easy-to-use
service on any platform, either mobile, tablet or on the Web, Airbnb optimized
the attractiveness of its concept. Airbnb app is in fact mobile optimized and user-friendly:
users can use the app more frequently, even to book a trip and to process
payment. Airbnb keeps being innovative and ingenious as users can now access
Airbnb from anywhere (in the street, on the train or subway, on a trip abroad)
and anytime (during lunch break, at work, on holidays etc.)
The three co-founders are
also fully aware of the importance of developing the same concept for business
purposes where business travellers could access the same type of platform
including a product listing and seletion. We think this surely is the future of
Airbnb to keep surfing on the IT wave!
Cécile ROUX & Margaux SCHERER
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