Homestays and Trust

We’ve done several homestays when we go on vacation ever since the kid arrived. Mostly because it gives access to a kitchen thereby giving a higher chance that the kid might eat something rather than nothing. But I always wondered why anyone would rent a room/home to a complete stranger without having met them?

Airbnb, a software company (and site and app) answers my question, at least for the West. It puts together people who want to rent a room (or house) with someone seeking said room (or house) for a short while. Like when you visit a new place or go on a short work trip. That’s somewhat similar to Uber putting riders and drivers in touch.

It’s supposed to be a win-win: the sublessor makes some money; the sublessee gets a home like environment or cheaper than hotel stay. As you might expect, hotels aren’t exactly thrilled with Airbnb. Others complain that people prefer putting their houses on Airbnb rather than renting them out the old fashioned way since short term rents are higher than longer term leases!

You might be wondering why anyone would rent a room or house to a complete stranger? How would a newcomer to a city know which home to go with?

Valid questions. And the theme there is the word: trust.

Both parties rate each other via the Airbnb app at the end of the experience. If your home is good, you get good ratings, others see that rating and come to you. If you are a good lessee, you get good ratings, and renters are willing to lease out to you. And so, as Ben Thompson writes:
“In the pre-Airbnb days travelers — and sublessors — justifiably prioritized trust above all else. In other words, the implication of Airbnb building a platform of trust is not that a homestay is now more trustworthy than a hotel; rather, it’s that the trust advantage of a hotel has been neutralized allowing homestays to compete on new vectors, including convenience, cost, and environmental factors.”
And:
“Staying in a hotel would not only be too expensive, it would also deny me the opportunity to at least get a taste of what it’s like to live day-to-day in a different country and culture — something you don’t get at your typical branded hotel.”

Of course, the Airbnb story doesn’t answer the India homestay trust question I asked at the beginning of this blog. So that’s still a mystery to me…

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more