The Airbnb Way Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

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Brief Summary

Best-selling author Joseph Michelli explains how Airbnb has disrupted the hospitality industry and found great success by focusing on its values and principles. This book shows how to create a compassionate and engaged community. How to have excellent customer service. How to get the most out of your stakeholders. All of the examples were obtained from multiple interviews with Airbnb leadership as well as hosts and guests.

About the Author

Joseph A. Michelli is an American psychologist, speaker, and author. He is the writer of multiple business books such as The Starbucks Experience, The New Gold Standard, Prescription for Excellence, and Driven to Delight. He was married to Nora Leigh Smith. His insights encourage leaders and workers to grow and invest passionately in all aspects of their lives. He received his master's and a doctorate from the University of Southern California and holds the Certified Speaking Professional designation from the National Speakers Association. He has two children. Nora did in 2013 after battling breast cancer.

Topics

Management & Leadership

The Airbnb Way Book Summary Preview

Airbnb is a successful business that connects travelers with hosts. The company makes billions in revenue and has millions of customers.

The founders attribute their success to the following values:

Creating a sense of belonging is essential to Airbnb leadership. They want people to feel at home anywhere. The founders are active listeners who realize that they do not know everything and who always seek for advice from third parties, including their employees and hosts.

Airbnb's mission is to "belong anywhere." For example, they try to eliminate "national wage gaps" and strive to have a diverse workforce.

For some time, for example, hosts were accepting fewer African American travelers. In 2016, Airbnb asked them to sign an agreement to treat people equally.

Trust is essential to Airbnb. After all, it asks hosts to accept strangers into their homes and strangers to stay at strangers' homes. Airbnb has hired former white house spokesman, Nick Shapiro, to handle trust and safety.

To provide trust and safety, Airbnb provides multi-factor authentication to verify identities. It offers excellent customer support. It conducts background checks when needed. It allows guests and hosts to message each other on the platform. It urges guests to use its website and app to handle booking and payment.

Hospitality is essential to Airbnb. Airbnb makes sure that hosts and guests have a pleasant experience. It encourages hosts to provide superior service and obtain 5-star reviews. On the host profile, there's information about previous feedback that the host provided. Hosts with negative reviews don't get as many bookings. Moreover, when a customer has a bad experience, Airbnb steps in. For example, when Amy had a lousy experience, Airbnb allowed her to get out of her commitment.

Airbnb's goal is to have a positive impact on its community and society. They want to empower people to enrich their communities. They provide a $1 million insurance coverage; they do not charge listing fees. Hosts can charge their own prices and obtain 98% of the profits. Airbnb covers the cost of marketing, payment processing, and customer service requests.

In 2018, Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, wrote a letter where he expressed his beliefs of making a positive impact on the world by promoting a sense of community in large and small spaces. Each founder has promised to give most of their fortunes to philanthropic endeavors. They started the Global Citizenship program and paid employees for volunteering. Their Open Homes program provided housing to Syrian refugees who were banned from entering the United States.