The motivation for hosts using Airbnb is typically a blend of making extra money and meeting new people. The children of Jill Banounou from Denver went to college: ‘I have an empty room now and it’s interesting to have people every once in a while.’ Stephanie Sullivan from Pittsburgh needed extra money to help pay for the maintenance on her 110-year-old home and loves having people stay. Matthias Siebler from Boston used the money to pay for an entire trip to England so he could attend an old friend’s wedding. Sandra Bruce from Washington is ‘hosting to save for my retirement. I also like having the company.’ Some people have started their own business with the extra money; for others it has helped them keep their home.
In January 2010, the team received this email from a woman named Kendra Mae Tai, a host in New York City: ‘Hi Airbnb, I am not exaggerating when I tell that you literally saved us. My husband and I just married this past May after losing both of our jobs and our investments in the stock market crash last year. We slowly watched our savings dwindle to the point where we did not have enough money to pay our rent. At that point, I listed our apartment on your website and received so many requests. . . . You have given us the ability to keep our home and travel together and the peace of mind of knowing we can make it through this challenging time in our life. Thank you so much.’
Remarkably, out of the ten thousand completed trips to date there have been no reports of theft. Sometimes an apartment is not clean or someone does not show up, but these cases are rare. Chesky believes that a ‘trusted intermediary’ and secure payment system have a lot to do with this record. When making a booking, guests put the reservation on hold using a credit card or PayPal account. Hosts are not paid in full until twenty-four hours after a guest has checked in. Airbnb charges hosts a standard 3 percent service fee and travellers an additional 6 to 12 percent depending on the reservation price. Aside from turning Airbnb into a real business with a profitable revenue model that has been growing at more than 10 percent every month since they launched, the founders believe that some form of payment ‘puts both parties on the best behaviour and makes the whole process more reliable.’
When Chesky told his grandfather about the idea behind Airbnb, ‘It seemed totally normal to him. My parents had a different reaction. I could not figure out why at first.’ Chesky later realized that his parents grew up in the hotel generation, whereas his grandfather and his friends would stay on farms and in little houses during their travels. Airbnb is not very different from that experience. ‘We are not the modern invention, hotels are.’ Indeed, prior to the 1950s, staying with friends or friends of friends was a common way to travel. Airbnb is an old idea, being replicated and made relevant again through peer-to-peer networks and new technologies.
There is now an unbounded marketplace for efficient peer-to-peer exchanges between producer and consumer, seller and buyer, lender and borrower, and neighbour and neighbour. Online exchanges mimic the close ties once formed through face-to-face exchanges in villages, but on a much larger and unconfined scale. In other words, technology is reinventing old forms of trust. Chesky predicts, ‘The status quo is being replaced by a movement. Peer-to-peer is going to become the default way people exchange things, whether it is space, stuff, skills or services.’
The Rise of Collaboration
Over the past couple of years, we started to notice that stories and business examples like Airbnb weren’t unusual. At dinner parties, instead of bragging about their new Prius, friends boasted how they had given up their cars altogether by becoming ‘Zipsters’ (members of the car-sharing service Zipcar). More and more friends were selling stuff on craigslist and eBay; swapping books, DVDs and games on sites such as Swap and OurSwaps; and giving unwanted items away on Freecycle and ReUseIt. On a trip to Paris, we saw cyclists pedalling around on sleek-looking bikes with the word ‘Vélib’ (Paris’s bike-sharing scheme) on their crossbars. A friend in London told us about her new favourite Channel 4 programme called Land-share. And we kept hearing about the number of people joining Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programmes or local co-ops. We saw stats and stories about online cooperation and the growth in virtual communities. Every day there are more than 3 million Flickr images uploaded; 700,000 new members joining Facebook; 50 million ‘Tweets’; and 900,000 blogs posted. There are twenty-three hours of YouTube videos uploaded every minute, the equivalent of Hollywood releasing more than 90,000 new full-length films into theatres each week.1
‘Collaboration’ had become the buzzword of the day with economists, philosophers, business analysts, trend spotters, marketers and entrepreneurs – and appropriately so.
We stumbled on articles about sharing, bartering, lending or swapping, often with some kind of ‘co’ in the headlines, such as ‘Co-Housing for Gen X & Y’, ‘Co-working: Solo but Not Alone’, ‘Couch Surfing: This Isn’t Just About a Place to Crash’, ‘Can Community Co-Ops Revive Our Towns?’ ‘Social Networking for Communes’, ‘Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online,’ ‘Living Together: Modern Answer to the Commune’, and ‘Governing the Commons’. Even science, social psychology and economic journals brimmed with popular articles about the self-organizing behaviours of ants, the ‘intelligence’ of swarming honeybees, and the cooperation of schools of fish and flocks of birds.
The more we examined these trends, the more convinced we were that all of these behaviours, personal stories, social theories and business examples pointed to an emerging socioeconomic groundswell; the old stigmatized C’s associated with coming together and ‘sharing’ – cooperatives, collectives, and communes – are being refreshed and reinvented into appealing and valuable forms of collaboration and community. We call this groundswell Collaborative Consumption.
The collaboration at the heart of Collaborative Consumption may be local and face-to-face, or it may use the Internet to connect, combine, form groups, and find something or someone to create ‘many to many’ peer-to-peer interactions. Simply put, people are sharing again with their community – be it an office, a neighbourhood, an apartment building, a school or a Facebook network. But the sharing and collaboration are happening in ways and at a scale never before possible, creating a culture and economy of what’s mine is yours.
Every day people are using Collaborative Consumption – traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting and swapping, redefined through technology and peer communities. Collaborative Consumption is enabling people to realize the enormous benefits of access to products and services over ownership, and at the same time save money, space and time; make new friends; and become active citizens once again. Social networks, smart grids and real-time technologies are also making it possible to leapfrog over outdated modes of hyper-consumption and create innovative systems based on shared usage such as bike or car sharing. These systems provide significant environmental benefits by increasing use efficiency, reducing waste, encouraging the development of better products, and mopping up the surplus created by over-production and -consumption.
In this book, we have organized the thousands of examples of Collaborative Consumption from around the world into three systems – product service systems, redistribution markets and collaborative lifestyles. Together these systems are reinventing not just what we consume but how we consume.
Although the examples of Collaborative Consumption range enormously in scale, maturity and purpose, they share similar underlying principles essential to making them work that we explore throughout this book – critical mass, idling capacity, belief in the commons and trust between strangers.
Collaborative Consumption is not a niche trend, and it’s not a reactionary blip to the 2008 global financial crisis. It’s a growing movement with millions of people participating from all corners of the world. Many of these participants may not even realize that they are part of this groundswell. To illustrate the explosive rise of Collaborative Consumption, let’s first look at the growth stats behind a few mainstream examples: Bike sharing is the fastest-growing form of transportation in the world,2 with over 500,000 trips being made in the first six weeks of operation for London’s Barclays Cycle Hire. Zilok, a leader in the peer-to-peer rental