Good morning from Skift. It’s Thursday, September 14. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.
25.08.2023 - 14:39 / skift.com / Dennis Schaal
Airbnb took several steps to ease the process of onboarding new hosts, increased damage protections, and added a half-dozen new search categories, including trending homes and those adapted for wheelchair access.
“We have more people turning to hosting than ever before, not least because of the volatile, challenging economic environment,” Airbnb Global Head of Hosting Catherine Powell told Skift Tuesday ahead of today’s announcement about the company’s winter release of product changes. “We want to continue to make it easier and simpler for everyday people make incremental income and to list their space on Airbnb.”
The company calls the new process of getting newbie hosts up and running and taking bookings Airbnb Setup. Under the plan, Airbnb will automatically match new hosts with experienced superhosts — 1,500 superhosts in more than 80 countries at launch — who can walk new hosts through the process of creating a listing, and even temporarily take over control of their listings to help get them started. The service is free for hosts, and can last through the first guest booking.
New hosts can also choose an experienced guest, meaning one who’s had at least three stays and has positive reviews, for their first booking as another way to ease the getting started process for hosts, the company said.
Automatically pairing new hosts with a select group of superhosts expands on Airbnb’s existing Ask a Superhost program, where new new hosts can get advice from more experienced peers. Airbnb Setup is geared to be more comprehensive than Ask a Superhost, and would include the ability to communicate with assigned superhost partners via text, audio, or video through the Airbnb platform, the company said.
Airbnb Setup likewise includes support from “a specially trained team of community support agents,” according to the announcement, for a year. New hosts supposedly get “one tap access” from within the app to this support team to help with payment issues or other account problems. The service would be available via text, email and phone in more than 42 languages, Airbnb said.
Airbnb also increased damage protections for hosts under its free AirCover insurance plan to $3 million, up from the current $1 million, added protections for cars, boats, art and valuables, and the company said it reduced the steps to file a claim from the current 14 to three. The process for getting compensated for a claim would remain an average of two weeks after the claim gets filed, Powell said.
Following Airbnb’s introduction in May of a bevy of new search categories for guests, the company said Wednesday it is rolling out a half-dozen new ones, including: New (properties that have been added to the platform over the prior 10
Good morning from Skift. It’s Thursday, September 14. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.
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Among the options that Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is mulling to remedy what he said is a “huge problem,” namely cleaning fees, is giving hosts the ability to levy “variable” cleaning fees.
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