My Airbnb experience

I was in need of finding a place to stay for one night during my 2 days trip to NYC back in June 2012. Many of the lodging options I found online were either not available or too expensive for me to consider. Later in the day, I came across Airbnb.com, and was fascinated by their services! 

Airbnb is an online platform which enables registered users around the world, referred to as “hosts”, to rent unoccupied rooms, houses, or even a castles for short or long term stays to travelers in need. Since I am taking social media marketing course now, I want to share some thought on why I find Airbnb fascinating:

Airbnb ask members to put detailed personal descriptions about themselves; it asks everyone who registered to verify their accounts with working phone numbers; and all sort of other things to ensure the rights of all the registered members. Once the transaction occurred (after the host has hosted the guests), both sides are asked to leave reviews for one another.

To be honest, I was very worried about living in some stranger’s house for one night, especially when I am all by myself and my host is a male. At the end, I choose to trust the personal descriptions of my host (he is a policemen of NYPD) and the comments that other guest gave him online. It was certainly a cool experience because it offers a completely new and more convenient choice for travelers – it’s a combination of hotels, lodges, and even couches surfing!

As learned in class, Internet is a place for “content aggregation”, I wonder how Airbnb can manage all the information collected from all the members around the world. I have found an introduction video of how Airbnb utilizes Hootsuite, an online business service that we will touch upon later in the semester. I have no experience of Hootsuite yet but this video does provide some insight of how a company can manage all the data on social media sites and transform them into useful information. (I will, perhaps, be blogging about this again once we start using Hootsuite.) 

Watch the video: http://blog.hootsuite.com/airbnb-social-media-growth/