Airbnb: designing for the host’s fear of strangers

Case study · Marketing 465 · Personas and Audience Journey Maps

Airbnb’s growth depended on one insight about the host side of its market, that letting a stranger into your home feels dangerous, and the company only fully acted on it after a crisis forced the issue.

The situation

Airbnb is a two-sided marketplace. It needs guests who want a place to stay and hosts who are willing to open their homes. Most travel brands only have to understand the buyer. Airbnb had to understand two very different people, and the second one, the host, was taking the bigger personal risk.

Co-founder Joe Gebbia described the core problem in a 2016 TED talk. Most of us are taught that ‘strangers equal danger.’ Investors had the same reaction. Gebbia said that of 20 investors the founders approached early on, zero invested.

The challenge

A host persona built only on demographics (age, city, income) would miss the point. The barrier was emotional. In his talk, Gebbia compared the audience’s nervousness in a trust exercise to how hosts feel ‘the first time they open their home.’ If Airbnb could not reduce that fear, the supply side of the business would never grow.

What they did

Airbnb treated trust as a design problem. Gebbia said ‘a well-designed reputation system is key for building trust,’ and the company built features around the host’s journey from ‘Who is this person?’ to ‘Yes.’

• Faces and profiles: early on, the team showed people’s faces across the service, from search results to profiles, to make strangers feel like people.
• Two-way reviews: guests review hosts and hosts review guests, so both sides build a visible track record.
• Message design: Gebbia said very short requests (‘hey, yo’) and very long ones both lowered acceptance rates. The right amount of disclosure in a first message builds trust.
• Host Guarantee: announced August 1, 2011, covering up to $50,000 in property damage from guest vandalism or theft, starting August 15, 2011.
• Larger guarantee: in May 2012, Airbnb raised the Host Guarantee to $1 million, backed by Lloyd’s of London.
• Verified ID: launched in April 2013 to connect users’ online profiles with their offline identities.

What happened

The Host Guarantee did not come from a calm research project. In July 2011, a San Francisco host known as EJ had her home ransacked by a guest. Airbnb handled the aftermath poorly for about four weeks. CEO Brian Chesky then published a public letter admitting ‘we have really screwed things up’ and ‘we weren’t prepared for the crisis,’ and announced the guarantee in the same letter.

In other words, the host’s fear was real, and a worst case made it public. Airbnb’s response was to build safety into the product and the brand promise, not just to issue a statement. By the time of Gebbia’s 2016 talk, TED’s page described Airbnb as having hosted 123 million nights.

Why it worked

Airbnb aimed at the right barrier. The host’s question was not ‘How much will I earn?’ but ‘Will I be safe?’ Each feature answered a specific moment in the host’s journey: seeing who is asking, reading what others say about them, checking that they are who they claim to be, and knowing there is a backstop if something goes wrong.

An insight only matters when it shapes product and policy. Airbnb turned an emotional insight about one persona into features both sides could see and use.

Where it gets complicated

Two parts of this story are messier than the tidy version. First, the biggest trust feature, the Host Guarantee, was a reaction to a crisis. The insight existed. Acting on it fully took a public failure.

Second, a design choice that built trust also enabled bias. Showing names and faces helped hosts feel they knew a guest. A 2016 Harvard Business School field study found guests with distinctively African American names were about 16% less likely to be accepted than identical guests with distinctively white names. In 2018, Airbnb began hiding guest photos until a host accepts a booking, and in 2022 it tested showing only initials to hosts for Oregon guests.

Designing for one persona’s fear can create harm for another persona. A good persona process asks who else is affected by a solution.

The marketing principle

Personas are most useful when they capture what a person fears or needs at a specific moment in their journey, not just who they are. Airbnb’s host insight was valuable because the company turned it into product, policy and promise. It also shows that solving for one persona can create new problems for another.

Sources

• Airbnb Offers Unconditional Apology, And $50,000 Insurance Guarantee, TechCrunch (2011)
• Airbnb partners with Lloyd’s of London for the new million dollar Host Guarantee, The Next Web (2012)
• In An Effort To Connect Users’ Online And Offline Identities, Airbnb Introduces Verified Identification, TechCrunch (2013)
• How Do You Design Trust Between Strangers?, NPR, TED Radio Hour (2016)
• How Airbnb designs for trust, TED (2016)
• Airbnb’s new experiment to combat rental bias uses initials instead of names, NPR (via GPB) (2022)

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