麻豆传媒

Nearly a decade after its founders hosted guests with a couple of air mattresses in their small San Francisco apartment, Airbnb has been used for more than 200 million stays worldwide, and the business is growing. At a time when trust is declining across society, how does the sharing economy persuade us to have faith in strangers? Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia told 麻豆传媒 how the company overcomes our wariness.

How do you get perfect strangers to trust each other?聽
In terms of what makes us human, trust is right up there with creativity and consciousness. Whatever the state of the media, or the current political environment, the core of being human means to trust somebody else.

All we get to do is remind people of the thing that they already have. Our business hasn鈥檛 actually created anything new. If you were to ask your great-grandparents how they travelled when they were kids, they would say, boarding rooms, farm houses, guest rooms, tiny inns. Before the modern age of mass-market accommodations, people stayed with other people.

How did you get your website to tap into this human instinct?聽
[By] designing for disclosure. Getting people to share just enough about themselves so that the other person feels comfortable sharing the same amount is really important. That can come in the form of a profile, in advance, or it can come in the form of messaging back and forth 鈥� and we use things like size of the text box to suggest the right length and guide them with prompts to encourage sharing.

Your first guests were fellow designers attending a conference. So, you had that in common. What convinced you that you could try this with total strangers?
Finding points of connection is absolutely crucial to building trust between strangers 鈥� it鈥檚 like knowing what tribe somebody鈥檚 from. In fact, we didn鈥檛 know a lot about our guests. But our tribe in the early days was the Industrial Design Conference. So that was the icebreaker that lowered the bar for us to feel comfortable.

Over the years, we鈥檝e sought to build a service that would allow people to surface their passions, interests, the things that drive them in the world, such that they can also find those shortcuts. Through profiles and a reputation system, you create an environment where people feel comfortable saying yes.

You have previously likened the current tools for building trust online to the safety features of the first Ford Model T. Why?聽
Ford introduced the Model T in 1907. About a year in, certain cities started to want to regulate cars. There were actually laws passed to make cars illegal. But no one wanted to go back to a horse and a buggy. So eventually the policy makers created policies based on what their constituents wanted.

Those early Ford Model Ts didn鈥檛 have seatbelts, headlights, rear view mirrors. But Ford learned, and iterated and ushered a whole new way of transportation into the 20th century.

We are at a similar stage of the internet maturing to a point where people are comfortable going back offline, to meet each other face-to-face, in person. And it鈥檚 still the early days. We鈥檙e learning the best way. We鈥檙e eager to make sure that we鈥檙e putting on the rear-view mirrors, the blinkers, all the things that we need to.

What are Airbnb鈥檚 rear-view mirrors and seat belts?
The host guarantee [a promise to reimburse hosts for property damage up to a value of 拢600,000] is an industry first, for example. We also have the safety and security of administering someone鈥檚 payment: we hold it, and then pay the host the day after you arrive, to ensure that the house is as it was described and as pictured.

You talk about Airbnb as a community 鈥� with a set of values you want your users to . How do you deal with issues like prejudice?
One thing is to communicate what we believe up front, so that we attract people who share those beliefs and opt in to that belief system. And second, going through the [sign-up] process, people get clarity on what it means to engage in our service, in our brand, and in our community.

I often reflect on a study that we did with , looking at people鈥檚 willingness to trust each other based on how similar they are in terms of things like age, gender, location. Not surprisingly, the research revealed that we prefer people who are more like us 鈥� basically, the more different they are, the less we trust them. That鈥檚 a natural social bias.

But something interesting happens when you add the element of reputation. So, in our case, reviews. Now, nothing changes if it鈥檚 less than three. But once you鈥檝e got more than 10, everything changes, in this research that they did. Basically, they proved that high reputation beats high similarity. The right design can help us overcome one of our most deeply rooted biases.

How do you rebuild trust when things go wrong?
The customer support team that we have is 24/7 around the world. You can鈥檛 eliminate all risk that there could be a breach of trust. But the team we put in place is to make sure that there鈥檚 no second breach of trust.

People need to know that you have their back if something were to go wrong. Statistically speaking, those bad things almost never happen. But when they do, it鈥檚 really important that people know they can call us 鈥� and we will do everything we possibly can to help.