Airbnb: Home away from home accommodation

Risper Awuor was renovating her Nairobi house to convert it into a hostel to attract the student population from the nearby university.

“But my contractor discouraged me and told me that students would not take care of my home and that I should look at listing it on Airbnb to attract a better clientele than students,” she says.

Risper, who had never heard of the portal did her research, and discovered that it was used to find and book accommodation around the world. She then re-did her home to a tastefully furnished apartment to accommodate tourists and local visitors rather than students before listing it on the portal.

That was the beginning of a long wait, which in hindsight, she says was a worthwhile investment. The apartment during the high season is constantly occupied, sometimes with only a few hours between clients.

Obama delegation

In Kenya, Airbnb was quietly taking root, until Brian Chesky, one of the founders arrived in the country in US President Barack Obama’s delegation last year. That’s when he created chatter around the concept, which today has 1,400 listings in Kenya available for booking, with 788 of them being concentrated in Nairobi, as at December 2015.

The use of Airbnb as a concept for homely accommodation is not limited to individual Kenyans and hotels listing their properties to get guests, but also Kenyans using the portal to find accommodation around the continent and the world as they travel for business and leisure.

“Kenyans are increasingly embracing Airbnb as a way of travelling and finding accommodation, with the number of Kenyan guests using Airbnb to find suitable accommodation around the world tripling in the last 12 months alone,” said Brian Chesky, co-founder of Airbnb during his visit to Kenya in November last year.

The chatter across the world around the new-kid on the hospitality block has been rapidly expanding by providing users with the option to book accommodation in ‘different’ and unique set-ups.

Online booking

You may want to spend a weekend in a tree house or a month in a gothic castle, the portal allows users the opportunity to do just that. If your wish is to live in a yacht in the French Riviera, all you have to do is save enough money for that and off you go.

In February, Cilla Muriuki and her colleagues were looking for an ideal destination to spend their Easter Holidays. After shopping around, they settled on Rwanda and were now left grappling with picking accommodation for their fairly large group, a challenge for many. Booking hotel rooms for large groups tends to be quite prohibitive.

They logged onto the Airbnb portal and after narrowing down the options in Kigali, they settled on Yambi Guest House. The best part of the experience for the group was that when they arrived in Kigali, they realised that the images on the site were an actual representation of the property.

“The whole process was easy, we booked online, paid and enjoyed our Easter holidays in a secure and inexpensive environment as we pooled our resources for the rooms. We were apprehensive in the beginning as we have heard stories of the accommodation not matching up to the pictures shown online or cases where what you see online no longer exists and yet you already paid some fraudulent online merchant,” said Cillia.

She was introduced to Airbnb by her colleague Carrey Aluoch who accompanied her to Rwanda. Carrey has used Airbnb extensively to travel in Europe and Lebanon. She first learnt about it through a friend of hers and downloaded the app on her phone when travelling with her fiancé to Austria, Italy, Spain and France.

Reviews

“Airbnb is so easy to use, it is not rocket science to log on and find accommodation that suits your pocket and taste,” she said during a phone interview with BDLife. The communication practitioner says all the places they stayed were good and meet their expectation other than France.

“It was terrible, in the photo the place looked big and newer than what we found on the ground. It was an old small room in a student hostel. We were quite disappointed,” she said.

What she advises those who want to use such a portal, is the importance of reading guest reviews about any establishment that may look interesting. People will usually give their honest opinion about a place with no malice. That is why anyone who wants to be part of this Airbnb community must ensure that what they offer guests is up to international standards as once you put up your space, it will be available for booking by guests from any part of the world.

Guests reviews on social media on the student hostel in France that was passed off as a nice cozy residence forced the owners to improve on it.

Social media is great for such things but can also be very brutal if what you offer is substandard.

Not just limited to the guests, hosts have also faced their own challenges. Risper states that the challenges come in two ways, the first being from the local infrastructure such as unreliable electricity and internet and the second being terrible guests who do not look after your property.

In Nairobi, even as the GDP and wealth continues to grow, water, sanitation, electricity and internet access continue to pose a challenge. With the city known for its regular blackouts at times such as when it rains, clients from Europe and the US, do not take it kindly when they cannot get running water or electricity or even regular access to the internet. This means that one may have to incur the extra cost of back-up power and water lest you get bad reviews.

“Two bad reviews can cost you any further bookings,” she says. According to her, offering internet access is an attracting factor that most travellers look for today. But some service providers experience frequent down time that the host has no control over but which can cost you a good review from fussy guests.

The listing relies on good reviews to attract customers and bad reviews are damaging, especially with today’s globe trotter who is reliant on the internet and social media for information.

The guests pose their own headaches to home owners especially when they are reckless with the house. “You have to take inventory at the beginning of the stay and there is also a provision for a deposit to take care of damages and breakages,” says Risper.

The damages and breakages can involve bed linen to furniture and cutlery. If you demand a security deposit in your listing then this should take care of any problem.

Cillia and Carrey are part of the Kenyans using the site for their travel accommodation options. Carrey says her Rwanda experience has been the best so far, while Cillia is already shopping for accommodation on Airbnb for her trip to France in July and hoping to have a better experience than her colleague.

“Airbnb is a technology disrupter which is here to stay,” says Mohammed Hersi, Chief Executive Officer at Heritage Hotels Kenya.

According to him, there is a growing curiosity for new technology and ideas that have been boosting the growth of disrupters like Airbnb, which does not own a single room yet is used by millions globally. “This gives would-be travellers an opportunity to know Kenyan and the country more,” he says.

Choice

With listings having the homestay option, the guest who prefers this can have an opportunity to live with the hosting family on a more personal level that cannot be replicated in a hotel. All they do is take one room of the main house for their stay.

“Hotels should not worry about this as there is enough space for all. A person staying at an Airbnb will stay there because that’s their choice. Those who prefer the comfort and ease of a hotel stay will still do that because they don’t want the hassle of cooking and doing their own laundry,” he says.

Travel sites including TripAdvisor have introduced similar concepts to allow individuals with villas and apartment to rent out to list on their portal, which was mainly used by hotels before.

The traveller has been turning to technology to know where, when and how to travel, creating room for all the entrants in the space including Bookings.Com, Sleepout, Tripadvisor, Homeaway and Expedia among others to cash in on it.

The payments for all these are made to the sites which then remit the funds to the owners of the houses and any other faction that may need to be paid.

HOW IT STARTED

Brian Chesky grew up in upstate New York with his social worker parents. He never once envisioned himself an entrepreneur and never thought of it as an option. He went on to join an art school, where he met his co-founder Joe Gebbia, with whom they would finally start Airbnb.

He quit his job with $1,000 (Sh100,000) in the bank and moved to San Francisco, only to get there and find that the monthly rent for the housing he got came to $1,150 (Sh115000). The weekend he arrived is the same weekend that a design conference was being held in the city.

“What if we turned our house into a bed and breakfast for the design conference?’ I thought to myself. Unfortunately I didn’t have any beds or household stuff. But Joe had just gone camping and had three air mattresses. We inflated them and we called it the AirBed and Breakfast,” he said.

“And that is literally how it started.”

What started as a means to get rent for the newly unemployed Brian, turned into one of the key disrupters in the accommodation sector across the world.

“When I was in school, being a disrupter was a bad thing. You were sent to the principal’s office for it,” he said, speaking to entrepreneurs at iHub Nairobi during his visit to Kenya in December 2015.

He got to meet different people coming to stay at his place and get to travel around the world without ever leaving his house. The concept was one that was dubbed a terrible idea but they launched and relaunched and relaunched again.

They took to the streets to tell people literally door-to-door about it to get the idea out there. From selling the idea from one person to the next, Airbnb, started in 2008 today has over 1.5 million listings globally in over 190 countries covering over 34,000 cities and has served over 40 million guests to-date.