“First of all, I want to tell you that I was almost kidnapped once in a red Mazda Miata.”
“Joe Gebbia, one of Airbnb’s co-founders, opened a recent TED talk. The theme of the speech was trust — one of Airbnb’s biggest challenges.
Design for trust is the most important theme in the hospitality industry, and Airbnb’s mission to “democratize” travel will rely even more heavily on that relationship. It wasn’t long ago that our friends and family thought Airbnb was so crazy that we believed anyone would be willing to let a total stranger stay in their home because most people’s instinct is to be wary of strangers.
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“Stranger danger” is a natural human defense mechanism, and breaking it will require a radical change in the mindset of both tenants and landlords. But we can reinforce that trust by studying what it is, how it works, and how we can build products around it.
How do you build trust between people, especially those who aren’t likely to meet every day? This is the core topic of Airbnb’s data Science and Experience research team. In preparing Joe’s presentation, we reviewed our understanding of trust and gathered in-depth information from many past projects. The purpose of this article is to share ideas and research that were not covered in the TED talks, and to inspire people to think about how to enhance trust relationships to develop a sharing economy.
Airbnb was sensitive early on to the need for businesses to create products that encouraged trusting relationships. To convince people to try Airbnb for the first time, they need to be convinced that the platform will protect them. So we decided to solve a complex set of problems.
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First we assume that people are inherently good, so if we have the right tools we can help people overcome their natural fear of strangers. To do this, it is necessary to adopt a real-name system and establish identity profiles for tenants and landlords. We created profile pages where they could upload photos of themselves, write their own profiles, link to their social media accounts and highlight their past travel experiences. As time goes on, we value these identity profiles more and more. For example, forcing them to provide personal photos because they rely heavily on them to build trust. In nearly 50% of trips, guests check their hosts’ profiles at least once, and 68% of these checks occur during the trip planning process prior to booking. Profiles are even more useful for new Airbnb users: first-time Airbnb guests are 20 percent more likely to check a host’s profile before placing an order than longtime Airbnb users.
In addition to strengthening identity data, we realized we needed a defense mechanism to build confidence. So Airbnb also built a payment system, a complex technical challenge. But it also allows us to figure out who is placing the order and can design rules to reduce uncertainty in the payment process. For example, the platform has a 24-hour buffer period after a tenant moves in before paying the landlord, so that both parties can notify us if something is wrong. To make it easier for people to contact Airbnb when they are in trouble, we have built a customer service system that is now available in every time zone and in multiple languages, running 24/7.
One way we measure these efforts is by looking at the rate of repeat visits — how often guests or hosts repeat Airbnb services. It’s not a direct measure of trust, but the more people trust Airbnb, the more likely they are to keep using it, and there should be a correlation. Evaluating the customer service system this way is clear: When a guest has a negative experience, such as the host cancelling his reservation just as he was leaving, the number of Airbnb guests coming back drops 26 percent. The decline in return visits after the call center intervention was almost wiped out — from 26 percent to less than 6 percent.
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We weren’t perfect at the beginning, and we’re not perfect now, but the progress is clear. We learned from a bad early lesson that we need to give landlords more confidence that the platform will be held accountable if something goes wrong. So we proposed a $1 million damage bond for eligible landlords. Every year more and more landlords try this program because it gives them confidence that they will have a good experience. This trust is not the same as that between host and object, but it is a very important first step: if trust is the building that hosts and objects build together, then confidence is the scaffolding for that building. Just like the main structure of the building, the result of what we do is we make it easier for people to try to build trusting relationships with others, but confidence does not create trust by itself, it can only be fostered between the host and the guest.
There are many different definitions of trust, and one interesting definition comes from political scientist Russell Hardin. He argues that trust is essentially a form of “interest bundling” : if I trust you, I assume that you will consider me and my interests in making relevant decisions.
Trusting people aren’t fools — they often need some proof that the trust they choose to place in a stranger is beneficial. Based on that, we can collect raw material and present it to users on the platform. This is one of Airbnb’s most important data products, which we call the reputation system.
The reputation system is a very important tool for the Airbnb community and is used very frequently. More than 75% of all trips received spontaneous reviews from users: this statistic is interesting because writing reviews doesn’t pay the reviewer anything; These reviews only add value to future guests and hosts, provide validation for Airbnb community members and help guests find suitable hosts. Getting a rating was an important indicator of a landlord’s ability to win orders — landlords with no rating were only about a quarter as likely to get an order as those with a rating.
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The reputation system helps guide landlords and tenants toward a positive experience and helps people overcome some of the stereotypes and biases that unconsciously influence our decisions. We all know that there are biases in society, and one of the strongest is that we tend to trust people who are like us — a phenomenon sociologists call convergence. But even social biases as powerful as convergence can be overcome by the credit system. In a recent study conducted in collaboration with social psychologists at Stanford University, there is evidence that Airbnb guests have similar instincts, but the study also found that enough positive reviews can help overcome this bias. In other words, people were more likely to trust strangers with a good reputation than “others who were very similar to themselves.”
Given the importance of reputation, we have been trying to increase the quantity and quality of user reviews. A few years ago, one of our team members observed that people’s reviews were biased toward optimism out of fear that bad reviews might lead to retaliation, and that bad experiences might be hard to reflect in their reviews. So we experimented with a “double-blind” evaluation process, in which tenant and landlord evaluations were shown only after both parties had completed the evaluation or after a 14-day waiting period, regardless of the order in which they were evaluated. As a result of this trial, the total number of reviews increased by 7%, including a 2% increase in negative reviews. That may not sound like a big number, but the impact of this change will add up over time — a simple trick that could improve the travel experience for millions of people.
When the foundation of trust is built, the powerful influence of the community begins to emerge and begin to overcome long-standing barriers to trust. The first and most important is that people from different cultures become more connected. On New Year’s Eve last year, for example, more than a million guests from around the world spent the year with their hosts in private hostels in more than 150 countries. Instead of squeezing into hotels with other guests, they stay with locals, increasing opportunities for cross-cultural communication to eliminate prejudice and promote understanding.
The graphic below shows how Airbnb travel connects different countries. The countries on the vertical axis are the home countries of the tenants, and on the horizontal axis are the destinations they travel to. Links to the images point to an interactive graphic page where you can see the proportion of travelers from different countries choosing different destinations.
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Airbnb’s user experience is excellent, so it’s natural for hosts to keep running their listings. As the experience of landlords increases, so does their acceptance of tenants. We also found that hosts prefer the cross-cultural opportunities Airbnb offers: people are 6% more receptive to guests from other countries than their own.
Becoming a landlord also brings more tangible benefits. Half of hosts reported that their financial gains from Airbnb helped them pay for things like rent and various daily living expenses; Depending on the market, 5-20% of landlords report that this income has saved them from eviction. Other landlords are using the proceeds for long-term savings, emergency funds to weather future economic turmoil; Others use the income to travel, and the spending on travel provides similar economic benefits to markets in other countries.
As communities become more trusting, the power of trust becomes more enduring. That trust can become a source of strength when tough times come. In 2012, when Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, a landlord asked us to change her listing price to $0 to accommodate refugees. Engineers worked overtime not only to meet her needs, but also to add a host of other features to help the Airbnb community deal with special situations during natural disasters. As a result, more than 1,400 landlords provided shelter to hurricane-affected refugees. Since then, we have developed these features into an international disaster response program that allows community members to help refugees displaced by disasters and relief workers battling disasters around the globe. Among the disasters and crises Airbnb responded to last year were the earthquake in Nepal, the refugee influx from Syria, terrorist attacks in Pakistan and the recent tropical Storm Winston in Fiji.
Joe, Brian and Nate (co-founders of Airbnb) recognized the importance of trusting relationships to Airbnb from the very beginning. These are just some of the many stories Airbnb has been trying to tell to build confidence in the platform and trust between people. Although the results of these efforts have been remarkable, we still have a long way to go.
One of the ongoing challenges we face is quantifying trust indicators. The team has been asking guests and hosts about their experiences and relationships with each other, as well as their overall impressions of the Airbnb community. But these are not perfect indicators of trust, nor can they be well quantified. The standard tools that scholars use to study trust are clunky, and it’s hard to reliably infer trust from behavioral data. But Airbnb is trying to develop a review tool that can be continuously improved and optimized to better measure trust levels.
Our motivation for studying trust isn’t simply to create better products — we also want to know what a trusting community can do. On a single night last year, 1.2m tenants shared a night with 300,000 landlords. Every encounter between a tenant and a landlord is an opportunity to bridge communication gaps, make new connections, and breathe new life into society over time.
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Building for Trust: Insights from Our Efforts to Distill the Fuel for the Sharing Economy
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