Apparently under the impression that its social-networking accommodations platform is not quite building up enough good will in the world amongst strangers, the folks at Airbnb have come up with a plan to spread the home-sharing love around by giving thousands of its members a holiday bonus: 10 bucks
According to a post in USA Today, the seven-year-old San Francisco-based startup, which is currently valued at more than $13 billion, has announced it will lay out $10 to 100,000 of its home-sharing hosts with the hope that each of them will use the money to do something nice for a stranger.
The home-sharing platform today unveils a $1 million initiative that will find 100,000 Airbnb hosts receiving $10 each, along with a challenge to use the small gift towards a gesture that makes the world a smaller place, chief marketing officer Jonathan Mildenhall tells USA TODAY.
“Our vision has always been to put our host community front and center, and this is just our way of putting that rhetoric into practice,” he says, adding that hosts were chosen at random. “We’re excited to see what they come up with.”
Mildenhall says the $10 could be used to buy seeds to plant in a community garden or to purchase art supplies for a neighborhood senior center. Whatever the gesture, hosts who receive the funds are encouraged to trumpet their good deed on social media and tagging it #OneLessStranger. Despite the boom in sharing-economy companies, “we still have a great fear of people we don’t know,” says Mildenhall. “I suppose an Airbnb host can use the funds to do something nice for a guest, but we’d really like to see it used on strangers. Admittedly, the whole thing is an experiment.”
The good-will gesture could also help the company’s reputation and maybe even its bottom line. Along with car-sharing giant Uber, Airbnb has tangled publicly with local municipalities whose regulators and chambers of commerce worry the social-networking platform could spawn housing violations and even steal business from traditional hoteliers.
The timing of the initiative matches the company’s single busiest night. Last New Year’s Eve, 350,000 people made their overnight arrangements via Airbnb’s global network of 1 million homes, apartments and rooms. This year, nearly 600,000 are projected to use the lodging service.
This year, an estimated 16 million people used Airbnb, which was founded in 2009 by CEO Brian Chesky.
