An easy way for Airbnb guests to trade their services in exchange for discounted or complimentary stays with Hosts.
Categories: Software, Barter, Sharing Economy
Skills required: Software or no-code, understanding of how Airbnb works
The Pitch
Have you ever searched on Airbnb and seen a place that clearly needed some help?
Pictures that look they were taken using a potato. Drab décor. Obvious signs of wear and tear. Lousy writing in the listing that misses important details, and doesn’t sell the features.
This is a huge missed opportunity. A lot of Airbnb Hosts try to do everything themselves either because they’re cheap, or they just don’t know a better way. The reality is that many Hosts struggle to keep up.
Enter the “AirbnBarter” opportunity.
What if there was an easy way for Hosts to find skilled experts to improve their properties in exchange for a discounted or complimentary stay?
Need better pictures? Trade a weekend stay for professional photography.
Deck is falling apart? Give a carpenter a place to stay for a week in exchange for rebuilding it.
There are loads of potential services & products that Guests could barter:
Professional photography
Interior Design
Painting
Artwork
Skilled trades (plumbing, electrical, etc)
Landscaping
Deep cleaning
Copywriting
Digital marketing
Website design (for multi-unit hosts)
Furniture
Influencer marketing (I cringe a bit at this, but it can work!)
Household goods (e.g. someone with a business or access to discounts on supplies or furnishings)
You get the idea.
Guests benefit from cheap stays, while Hosts can enhance the future earning potential of their listings. A pretty straightforward win-win.
The solution here is an online marketplace to make this easier. Hosts can add their listings, and select the products/services for which they have a need. Guests can create profiles that serve as both a portfolio/resumé as well as allow them to select places they would like to travel.
Hosts and Guests can search for each other to find a match of skills and needs.
You, as the platform, make money from memberships, advertising, or affiliate commissions.
Airbnb boasts over 150 million users worldwide. If you can unlock the skills that many of those Guests have to offer Hosts, you’re looking at a huge opportunity!
The Background
This idea came from one of my recent Airbnb stays.
The place was great overall, but there were some signs of wear. A shower head that was broken, a deck in need of painting, a lot of dusty nooks and crannies that likely get missed during changeover cleanings.
For many Hosts, it is probably hard to stay on top of maintenance and cleaning. Costs add up quickly, it can be hard to schedule services around Guest stays. A Host would often also have to forgo days of occupancy to take care of larger projects.
The only way for any kind of bartering currently is for a Guest to manually reach out to Hosts and try to find people open to bartering. That’s not effective, and could easily get you reported. And for Hosts, there isn’t really any way to do this at all.
A bartering marketplace would help solve this problem far better than the available alternatives.
Strategy Notes
At critical mass, this could be a huge opportunity and run very well. Before that point, you have a two-sided marketplace problem. There’s also some specifics around bartering that need to be worked out.
First, building the marketplace.
Start with one city that is popular for hosting and in-demand for travellers - New York, LA, Las Vegas, Chicago, Miami, Toronto, Montreal…
Pick one or two skills to start. Photography seems like a good one. It’s easy to find hosts with crappy pictures, and there are already lots of ‘digital nomad’ photographers. This makes it easier to pitch your value proposition when starting out: “get professional quality photography of your listing in exchange for a few nights stay” is a lot sticker than ambiguous open-ended bartering.
Build the Guest side first. Hosts will initially be less likely to keep coming back than Guests; they’ll come for what they need, book it, and leave. Guests will keep coming back as long as they want to find ways to travel on the cheap. Find communities where your ideal Guests might congregate. Subreddits, Facebook Groups, Meetups could be good spots. Infiltrate and start conversations. The people are out there!
Then go to places where Hosts might advertise their listings outside of Airbnb/Vrbo, like Facebook Marketplace, craigslist, their own websites. Place ads there. Reach out to folks manually. If you pick photography, the pitch is straightforward:
Hey there. Your place looks great, but you could be earning significantly more if you had some higher quality photos. Would you trade some of the time you have vacant for professionally done photos? Check us out: [website]
This one would take a lot of “do stuff that doesn’t scale” until you can get word of mouth going, but it can definitely be done!
The second piece to figure out is managing quality of Guest barterers. You can’t have folks trading for stays, and not fulfilling their end of the bargain.
Initially, you probably want to screen manually. Look at portfolios, interview people, look at their Airbnb and social media profiles.
It may also be smart to come up with a deposit system. Guests could pay in a few hundred dollars to be held as an insurance policy to pay out unhappy Hosts. You would also want to have a way on platform for Guests to upload their work, and for Hosts to rate the quality of work traded.
To start, I don’t think you need to actually manage the stays or take payments. Just layer on top of Airbnb, and let Hosts share their listings that way. That way, you really just need a way for Hosts and Guests to create and search profiles by skill and location, and maybe two-way messaging.
Start small and focussed, and build up slowly. If you can find a way to create a bartering experience that people love, the rest of the roadmap will create itself.
Data & Research
Airbnb has a Guest affiliate program, which would present one easy monetization option. You need 1 million unique visits per month, though.
Occupancy rates for Airbnbs average between 35-50%. That’s a lot of unused capacity…
On any given day, Airbnb has over 660,000 active listings in the United States.
Name Ideas
AirbnBarter may actually meet some trademark infringement issues! Some other ideas: SkillsforStays or SkillforStay, BarterStay, TradeStay, TradeAway.
Would you use this, or build it? Share your thoughts!