Conversations at the Skoll World Forum
An Interview Between +SocialGood’s Shariha Khalid Erichsen and Aoife McArdle of Airbnb
Global changemakers gathered in University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School to exchange ideas, entrepreneurial approaches and innovative solutions to address the world’s most pressing challenges. +SocialGood Connector and Managing Partner at Mission & Co., Shariha Khalid Erichsen reported from the forum to discuss the emerging themes, solutions and how we can collaborate to shape interventions and dialogue.
In this interview, Shariha speaks with Aoife McArdle, Director of Business and Social Impact Trips at Airbnb, a global travel community that uniquely leverages technology to economically empower millions of people around the world to unlock and monetize their spaces, passions and talents to become hospitality entrepreneurs.
Meet Aoife McArdle:
Aoife McArdle is Director of Business Affairs and Social Impact Experiences at Airbnb. In this role, she is responsible for Airbnb’s global work which provides opportunities for hosts to develop and offer handcrafted, curated experiences that immerse travelers in local communities and raise awareness and individual giving for local nonprofit and non-governmental organizations. As a seasoned leader at Airbnb, Aoife was previously General Counsel for Airbnb in Europe, Middle East and Africa. In this role, Aoife, pioneered and expanded regulations for home sharing, working closely with government officials in numerous countries to develop smart regulation in multiple cities including Amsterdam and Paris.
Before joining Airbnb, Aoife was Head of Commercial and Regulatory Affairs at Skype where she lead a global team through rapid growth, including delivering the company’s first ever agreement with a telecommunications operator, enabling Skype on mobile devices. She also served as European Legal Counsel at Apple where she oversaw legal and policy for the company’s product distribution across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Aoife holds a Masters in Business Administration with a concentration in tourism from the University of Montpellier, France, and a law degree from University College Dublin, Ireland.
*Note: Interview edited lightly for clarity
Shariha: Hello Aoife! I am really excited to learn more about Airbnb’s journey and the new product ‘Social Impact Experiences’ that is now being offered to travellers from around the globe. Can you please share with us about Airbnb’s journey and this new product?
Aoife: Sure. We are specifically here today to introduce people to Social Impact Experiences which is a sub-category of what we call Airbnb Experiences. I will start with a high-level overview of what Experiences is all about and then go on to talk about our journey. Experiences is an opportunity for people to host without needing access to a home. Experiences is all about your time, your passions, your interests and sharing the same with an audience of hundreds of millions of travellers from around the world who use our platform. A platform that encourages a new kind of entrepreneurship where locals, individuals and small existing businesses now have the opportunity to amplify their impact.
Launched in November 2016, Experiences is all about hosting your time, your interest, your passion. You can spend a day with a Chef in New York, you can go Salsa dancing in Cuba with some of the local dancers, you can go urban gardening in London with a local nonprofit that is into sustainable food and the food justice movement. These are all different types of experiences on the platform. And within that category we have launched Social Impact Experiences where community nonprofits and social enterprises can now sign-up to be hosts and connect with a wider community and importantly,Airbnb waives its fee and 100% of the money goes directly to the organisation.
There is a whole new generation of travellers who want to travel with purpose. They want to connect with the people who are involved in a particular cause and understand ways in which they can directly get involved and make an impact. So the objective of Social Impact Experiences is more specifically to create that proximity between travellers around the world and the communities or local people who are engaged in some of these incredible causes. Our hope is that these experiences help foster empathy and inspire an inner-shift in perspective or transformation and by becoming ambassadors for some of these causes around the world.
While this is the new product, let us go back in time to talk a bit more about the Airbnb journey. I personally joined Airbnb almost six years ago. Back then, it was a small start-up. While it was already starting to grow fast, it was largely unknown. Our founders who were living in San Francisco could not afford to pay their rent. There was a huge design conference that was being hosted in San Francisco and all the hotels were completely booked. So they came up with the idea of renting out three airbed mattresses hosted 3 people from different parts of the world in their apartment. They made them breakfast and took them around San Francisco and made incredible friends for life.
Following this, they built a website and this was just the beginning of their growing community of hosts from around the world who were opening up their homes essentially to strangers looking for a place to stay.
I remember when I had joined, I would tell people about Airbnb and the concept. For e.g. I happened to tell my father that I was joining this startup that offered locals an opportunity to open up their homes to strangers from around the world. He just roared laughing and expressed how this was a ridiculous idea and that it would never work. But here we are six years later with a presence in 191 countries and 65,000 cities. At the end of 2017 we had hit 260 million guest arrivals and we are over 300 million now. We have over 4 million homes listed on our website. That’s just our homes business which has exploded over the years. From crazy early adopters and risk-takers to mainstream, almost everyone is getting involved.
Shariha: That is a really interesting journey. One of the key things about proximity which is the theme of the Skoll World Forum, is empathy. It’s about including others and really building relationships and trust with the community. And these are the key values that Airbnb is promoting through it’s services. In addition to this, the other thing that I really love is how you are actually helping people increase their economic livelihoods. Can you talk a bit about these key values and the themes I have raised and where you see their potential with this new product?
Aoife: Absolutely. What really inspired the launch of Experiences was the fact that we had this growing community of guests who wanted to stay in people’s homes and we kept going back to understanding why they chose to stay in people’s homes? It was all about connecting with the locals. They wanted to really immerse themselves and see cities or places and destinations through the eyes of the locals. And Experiences is all about fostering that connection.
Through Experiences, we could enable a much greater connection and sense of belonging. Our mission has always been ‘to belong anywhere’ and this we feel aligned perfectly with our mission. In addition to this, it was providing locals with a new source of income. By simply listing their experience on the platform, they had access to this worldwide audience of hundreds of millions of travellers. It is also a simple way of diversifying tourism dollars to neighbourhoods and communities that don’t typically benefit and thus, creating these new entrepreneurship opportunities. So that was sort of what inspired the launch of this new product.
Now to go deeper on the proximity element as well as the livelihoods aspect. First of all, for anyone who has changed the course of his/ her life; let’s take for example people here at the Skoll World Forum; they have devoted their lives to these causes as a result of their personal experiences or by connection to a person that they met who has inspired them to take the direction that they took. And with Experiences and even more so with Social Impact Experiences, we are trying to create that proximity. It’s like a gateway to caring. When people connect with communities or organisations that are engaged in different incredible causes, it will create that proximity and inspire a shift in perspective and while fostering a life-long connection.
From the livelihoods perspective, we have different initiatives. For e.g. In Amman, Jordan we have partnered with the government to provide opportunities for local communities to host Experiences. Some hosts are actually refugees and they are providing food experiences, music experiences, art experiences and so on. Thus the income they are generating can have a huge impact on their entire livelihoods, their families and communities. This is just a taste of some of the things we are doing from a livelihoods perspective. It is essentially creating entrepreneurship opportunities and enhancing destinations and communities by providing access and proximity in ways that were never possible before. Also, the platform not only creates these connections but also builds trusts between communities and places that was not possible before.
Shariha: Basically through the technology platform you are creating very human connections across borders and cultures.
Aoife: Yes, people-powered connections. The entire platform is people powered. And I would like to add, at a time when jobs are being replaced by robots and automation, what we are trying to do is create self-driving people. Be it art, music or food, these are things that cannot be replaced by robots and automation. The personal stories and human connections are led by people. And we think this is only going to grow. Be it new entrepreneurship opportunities or even education, this is the direction people need to take for their livelihoods.
Shariha: How can people get involved?
Aoife: If you go onto the Airbnb website and hit Experiences, you will find information on how to become a host. If you are a nonprofit or a social enterprise, you can refer to the sub-category of Social Impact Experiences. There is a whole section on onboarding and ways in which you can list your experiences. Our website has a whole lot of information and education to help and guide you through the entire process. Additionally, on the social impact side, you can contact with us directly and our team would be delighted to help out any social enterprise or nonprofit that would like to get involved.
