On the last day of 2016, I lived in airbnb in Rome. The landlord who received me was an old lady. She kindly explained to me the usage of various electrical appliances and facilities in the room, and wished me a happy new year. The landlord told me that I would not be able to see the end of the trip on the snowboard, but I would not use the snowboard to look at the end of the trip.
Look at the sunset at the door of the B & B
After returning from Europe, I lived in a house in an alley in Jing'an, Shanghai, and I clearly remember that I still paid for the order with visa card - it won't receive the once derided Chinese name "aibiying" until two months later, and access the payment method of Alipay. As for wechat payment - in an interview with Qianwang in September 2019, co-founder Bai Siqi said that China's performance grew faster than expected, but they have not realized that this payment method is so important.
In those days when big factories were still thriving and online stores were not everywhere, these landlords who worked in foreign enterprises or opened coffee shops, as well as "Wenqing" and student tenants who backpacked constituted its seed users in China, and began to share their lives in such an inconvenient way.
II
On December 10, 2020, airbnb was finally listed, and its share price doubled at the opening, and finally closed at US $144 / share. After the news of "withdrawing from China" was announced today, the share price closed up 0.65% to US $113.28/share, but fell 40% from the historical high.
At that time, I was living in a home stay on the 30th floor. The sunset glow was photographed from the balcony
This listing journey is undoubtedly bumpy and legendary. 13 years is probably too long for today's unicorns - it has been less than six years since the emergence of the Big Mac Tiktok. It began during the 2008 financial crisis and was missed by sun Zhengyi, who invested in numerous "sharing economy" projects. Its growth curve seems so "natural" rather than ripening.
After the arrival of the epidemic, airbnb also had to face the cold winter. After the second quarter of 2020, it successively laid off 2000 employees, accounting for 1 / 4 of the total number of employees at that time. However, such a scale of layoffs did not bring any loss of reputation - four months of severance pay, the issuance of shares, and such favorable conditions also reflected its consistent "conscience" benefits to employees. After all, at that time, people almost lost confidence in whether it could be listed.
Less than a month ago, airbnb also announced that its employees would be able to work remotely from anywhere permanently, and their salaries would not change no matter where they worked. In the trend that major companies in Silicon Valley are eager to call employees back to the office, this "clean flow" has brought millions of visits to its recruitment page.
III
However, even in this rhythm and culture, airbnb faces many problems.
Although it had gained a firm foothold in China before the arrival of the epidemic and achieved a faster growth rate than its competitors, it also depended on its C2C and asset light model, and the "side effects" of this model were difficult quality control, contradiction and coordination between landlords and tenants, and government relations.
B & B should be a slow-paced business, and the keyword "cozy" appears repeatedly in the description of houses. However, with the expansion of its scale, airbnb is more and more difficult to carefully review and manage its landlords and houses; And it also needs those professional "second landlords" to provide more houses for it in batches. As a result, the cleaning was not clean, the lease with the original landlord came one after another, and even the bad events of "placing cameras in the room to secretly take pictures" occurred many times.
In the most important front-line market in the Chinese market, the per capita housing area in Shanghai is small, but the rising momentum of house prices and rents is fierce; There are many old houses with a history of decades in the core urban area. Even after the transformation, it is difficult to avoid defects in structure, sound insulation and so on. In order to compete with the increasingly Red Sea hotel industry, landlords are forced to carry forward the spirit of "making a Taoist temple in a screw shell" in old Shanghai and try their best to make some "characteristics".
As a result, the "cheap" guests have more or less experienced disappointment and return. At the same time, the quality of tenants will inevitably decline, ranging from not paying attention to hygiene and disturbing neighbors in the middle of the night, to damaging goods and stealing furniture and electrical appliances, and even the crew rented civilian houses for shooting without notice, causing irreversible damage. Airbnb's coordination and appeal process is not very rigorous. It often accepts one side of the words of one party, and then has poor communication if it wants to recover.
Such barbaric growth has not only made airbnb an "unwelcome person" in some communities, but also attracted the attention of regulators. Since 2017, although airbnb has signed strategic memoranda with many local governments, the requirements for landlords, identity registration and other conditions are always changing. After the epidemic, all localities tightened one after another; In case of sudden closure and isolation, residents are also likely to fall into an embarrassing situation.
IV
Nevertheless, airbnb's landlords still have a large number of "idealists", or people who are more in line with the user portrait it originally gave, than those fully commercial B & B platforms - especially the business lines that OTAs try to do.
In my experience, only airbnb really has that kind of "sharing" atmosphere, rather than a simple business. You may meet a landlord with a very interesting lifestyle who lives in the attic of a private club in the villa area; Or meet a South American foreigner who is a doctoral student in Zhejiang University and exchange local customs or his mixing skills with him.
The layout of the old landlord in Shanghai is full of local and DIY elements
As an LV 4 users, I used to travel to and from many places in the Yangtze River Delta without renting a house, because it only costs 70 or 80 yuan to live in the quiet corner of the old block of Pingjiang road for one night; Next to the global port in Shanghai, the room decorated with great care by the old teacher and his wife costs only 120 for half a month. After the outbreak began, airbnb began to offer frequent service fee concessions and exemptions, but perhaps it is this strategy that makes it more unprofitable in this market.
What airbnb promises is a free, diversified and exploratory way of life. It encourages people to go out of their familiar areas to contact more people, understand and try a richer state of life. However, many preconditions of this way of life are obviously more and more difficult to establish in the post new crown era. The story of "sofa and backpacker" gradually becomes fancy with the growth of users and financial resources, but it is also like an expanding rainbow bubble.
Quiet alley outside Pingjiang road home stay
After the circle of friends I felt sorry for it was sent out, I found that most of the likes were my college classmates (most of whom had overseas experience) and some workers in the media industry. The hidden "identity" can be seen. Perhaps our reluctance to withdraw from its business is more a nostalgia for the past.
Finally, I sincerely hope that it will be a correct judgment to "retain the outbound tourism business line".
