Idea: Airbnb stories
Ever since I first booked a stay on airbnb in fall 2013 I have been in love with this company and product. I used it on journeys to San Francisco and New York, Budapest and Warsaw, had amazing experiences all over the world and met people that I am still in touch with today.
About half a year ago when I was planning a summer trip however, I noticed a behavior of mine that got me thinking. While me and my girlfriend were looking for a place to spend our summer holidays, we were not certain which country or city we wanted to go to. We were looking for places in Europe and even though I every now and then I found an amazing place on Airbnb in Chile, Peru or Bali we did not book a stay with one of those amazing hosts but chose a hotel in Austria which was in fact more expensive.
Why? Why did we book a more expensive hotel which was, on top of that, only a few hundert kilometers away in a country that I had already been too several times? If we wanted to travel the world (I can say for sure that we both were people that loved travelling to unknown countries), why had we chosen a hotel in Austria?
Those questions kept me busy a few weeks. We had started planning the trip right before our university exams so we both had been very busy during this time. On the other hand, it did not seem like booking the hotel had been easier and less time consuming than booking a stay on Airbnb.
No, Airbnb would indeed have been much easier and faster so time was not the crucial factor here.
I started thinking about security issues and whether those had probably influenced our desicion. I knew however, that I myself had been a frequent Airbnb user in the past few years and had never experienced any issues. Security was also not the key here.
When I finally found the aswer to those “why”-questions I realised that this time, I had done something different when reflecting on our desicion making process. Other than having a look at the factors that could have probably influenced us in a negative way to go for an Airbnb, I started to wonder what had positively influenced us to go for the hotel instead.
When I went to my room this day to have a look at the info material we had gotten from the hotel a few weeks before, I found the answer instantly:
Imagination.
Imagination. We had chosen the hotel because of the way the info material helped us to imagine not only our stay, but the whole trip as well. We had seen so many pictures of the hotel rooms and lobby and restaurant, but when I thought about it again I realised that I had never heard my girlfriend talk about rooms, the design or the athomsphere in the hotel lobby.
No. I heard her talking about biking we could do in the alps, hiking routes with beautiful panorama, waterfalls, the Merano market we could visit on Wednesdays, lakes that were nearby with wakeboarding and the possibility to rent a bike for free every single day. I even read that climbing would be possible (I love climbing).
My girlfriend and I had been able to better imagine our trip in a moment when we did not have the time to choose any place in the world and keep looking around for hours on travel blogs and info pages just to get ourselves imagining what our trip could look like. Instead, we chose a host that helped us with imagining those two weeks by informing us about all the activies that would be available to us during our stay.
When I had found the answer that day I realized what I had been lacking before when I was browsing Airbnb. Sure, I had seen the beautiful pictures of those locations, houses and flats in Peru. I had seen some very few pictures on the landscape and I had read a few lines on activities that were nearby and I was sure that all of them were true and realistic. But it was not enough for me to be certain that me and my girlfriend would find activites we would both enjoy together when travelling to this exact location for two weeks. I wanted the trip to be a very special experience and I wanted to be certain that when choosing this location, it would become one.
I wanted to know where I was going to, which places, possibilities and activites we could experience and what an example journey to this place looked like.
Since I have been working on IT-projects for several years now and since I love Airbnb as a company and product I started working on an idea that could have helped me with these issues and not choose the hotel after all and for now I want to call it: Airbnb stories.
Airbnb stories is, in my eyes, exactly what could have help me with my desicion and what could be the next step in Airbnb completely redefining travel, travelling news and how we discover the world’s most beautiful places.
By giving both guests and hosts the possibility to write about their hometown or journey, Airbnb could establish a colorful book of stories directly connected to their worldwide listings.
You can see an example Airbnb story page about an airbnb trip to Budapest on the left. It features the story in text format, a title image and images throughout the story. The side bar shows the host Nina stayed with, the activities she has connected with her story, her story map with places she recommends visiting and friends of the reader who have been to that place before (Facebook connected).
In the following, I want to shortly introduce a few designs I prepared to visualize this idea and I also want to show a short concept of how I believe this new feature could work out successfully.
Concept (how?)
For such a feature to work out sucessfully there has to be an intuitive and easy way to write those stories, to share them with friends and to interact with stories already written.
I. Hosts and guests
First of all, I divided the user flow of writing a new Airbnb story into a guests path and a hosts path. Both user groups will probably have different intentions when writing a new story which is why the perspective of the story’s author should become very clear for the reader at first sight.
II. Story features
What will the story display besides photos and text? For this concept I decided to include a “story map” and an “activities overview”.
III. Comments, likes and shares
Of course, users should have the option to comment on stories, share them via social media or other channels and “like” a story to recommend it to other users.
Why would someone take the time and write such an airbnb story?
I believe that people love to share stories and experiences. If this was wrong, then why would you even be looking at a site called Medium where people write thousands of stories every single day? It has to be this way. However, I think that besides people loving to share what they have experienced in there lives, there are also ways to motivate users to write Airbnb stories and to get a feature like Airbnb stories started.
I. Hosts
Why would hosts want to write a story about there hometown and listing? Because they want their flat, room or castle to be popular on Airbnb! They want to differentiate themselves and want to advertise not only the place they are renting out, but also the environment their guests would be living in. An Airbnb story could be the perfect place for any host to create a catalouge of photos and info material of the place their listing is located in.
The world has beautiful and interesting places, use the chance to tell a story about where you live and why this place is worth a visit.
II. Guests
People love sharing experiences. They love to write travel diaries, blogs and discuss travelling with people all over the world. But even if guests do not have such a strong benefit in sight as advertising their own listing could be, offering a discount on the next booking or a small reward could be something compareable to that kind of benefit. Other than that however, I believe that there are many enthusiastic airbnb users all over the world who would love to share their very own airbnb story. I would definitively do it!
This concept was written by me to communicate my interest in Airbnb as a company and to share an idea.
I envision Airbnb as a company with the potential to some day, be one of the very top web addresses for everything related to travelling the world and I believe that a feature like Airbnb stories could be a huge benefit to the company and its users.
My name is Patrick Häde, I am 21 years old and a software developer from Hamburg. As seen, I do design, too,and if you are reading this, Airbnb, I would love to get in touch.
And for everyone on Medium: Feel free to recommend if you like the idea and let me know what you think :)
