Airbnb Reward Experience: Wine in the Dark
It’s Wednesday the 7th of December and here in Airbnb HQ, 888 Brannan Street in San Francisco, we are experiencing a mind-blowing food experience — in the dark! The Feat for Airbnb program kicked off on November 23rd and involves around 120 Airbnb employees from the engineering department that are split into random teams (named after fruits and veggies). Each individual is eligible to earn coins by completing healthy actions (steps taken, sleep recorded) that are traced through a wearable tracker and the Feat mobile app. Coins can then be redeemed for team prizes.
After the first sprint (two weeks of competition) of the Feat program in Airbnb, four teams had were able to claim the first prize: Tomato, Pineapple, Carrot and Cherry. Sounds exciting! Three of the teams are in San Francisco, the fourth in Seattle. A little cross country competition is always good! It seems that engineers are bonding and the teams are taking the challenge seriously! So far, so good!
Today the first reward took place. It was a blind wine tasting with Hoby Wedler. Wedler is a UC Davis doctoral student nominated by Forbes in the “30 Under 30” list of young leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs. The Petaluma-born wine educator has been leading blind wine tastings at Francis Ford Coppola Winery in Geyserville since 2011. He blindfolds his unsuspecting guests and leaves them with this startling revelation: sight can be detrimental when it comes to tasting.
4 wines, a circular room and a blindfold — nothing else. Wedler has been blind since birth but uses what might be considered a disadvantage as a teaching tool. He was able to convince participants from the winning teams that the “world is amazing even without seeing it.” We can taste it, smell it, touch it and enjoy it. “Wine is art,” says Wedler, and through this, art can be defined as something that makes us feel a deep emotion. Wedler suggests that there is not good or bad wine, just feeling and experience. It’s all about emotions. You feel it with your soul, not with your eyes.
It was a terrific experience and a valuable opportunity for making all of us understand how food can be deeply connected to our senses and emotions and how food can be used as a tool to understand more about our personal lives. As always at Feat, we aim to combine everyday healthy lifestyle motivation with deeper food understanding. It is something that can be called “Food Care”. We believe that food has the gift of facilitating short and long term well-being through experiences like this blind wine tasting. I don’t think there’s a better way to start off the reward series for our beloved Airbnb participants than with this message: “Step back from your iPhone for a second and use your senses as you best as you can.”
