Airbnb Launches Host Mentor Program and Host Tools

With Proposition F left in the dust, Airbnb has launched an all-fronts engagement campaign with the public face of their company: the Airbnb hosts who open their homes to travelers and make the company possible.

The company is putting its worldwide offices to work, with their London mobile app developers and San Francisco operations team working together to launch a “toolkit” for hosts, featuring locally-tailored video lessons and resources. The goal: more effective and profitable hosts, and better experiences for guests. Especially in areas where Airbnb is still somewhat new, improving a system often littered with unreviewed, possibly un-monitored listings will be critical to growing the hospitality sharing economy to the next level.

But a video dashboard isn’t the only front on Airbnb’s push to grow their economy; mobile app developers at the company have also launched a clever mentorship program for Airbnb hosts, offering travel credits and other perks in exchange for mentoring new users to help them get their momentum going; hopefully this feature will help solve the “profile littering” issues mentioned above.

Last but not least, the platform is finally seeing a “smart pricing” feature to take some of the workload off of hosts when it comes to monitoring market prices in their area and constantly having to adjust their rates in response to a million variables from holidays to competition. Analysis of the host engagement campaign places promise on this feature above all others to allow hosts to focus more on serving the guests they have than wasting time and energy on booking them in the first place.

The takeaway of the new engagement push from Airbnb, for mobile app developers at least, is that the most important factor for growth of sharing-economy apps is engagement with the hosts, drivers, delivery people, and etc. who make these apps possible. After all, sharing economy apps exist to connect people to one another; if those people are happy and successful, so are the mobile developers building out the platform.