How and How far can it go? Some personal thoughts about Airbnb in China
As a UX designer and researcher with a design thinking beyond digital products, I have always been keeping an eye on Airbnb, who provides a fast expanding O2O accommodation-sharing platform globally in 191 countires.
I have been an relatively experienced user of Airbnb when I was studying and working abroad in the past three years. Last year Airbnb decided to officially entering the Chinese market and competition, following the step of Uber. However, as Uber declared last week to be merged with Didi, the long-time Chinese competitor with Uber in the car-sharing industry, how far can Airbnb lead in the Chinese market?
Last month was my first time to use Airbnb in China, when I flew out from the Netherlands to Beijing. We encountered such a frustrated situaion that we finally decided to move out to a hotel even though we have to get charged for half of the full-month rent according to Airbnb’s global regulations. During the whole process, we felt really helpless because it was impossible for us to contact any Airbnb consultants since we were using the global website of Airbnb as always. Later I found out the specially Chinese Airbnb website has a service hotline at the bottom of their Chinese website, which is very different from the global website we usually used. Well I do believe we are the unlucky ones whose experience might lead us not to choose Airbnb in China for a while, there are many other successful experience in China as I can see on the website.
I was inspired by two articles recently read related to the experience research and design of Airbnb:
User research: Airbnb for the Chinese market (Displays 5 different personas with key interviews)
Airbnb case study: How design helps cross-culture business (Demonstrates strategies Airbnb used for building up cross-culture trust and marketing)
Instead of muttering my bad experience, I would be more interested to see the new moves of Airbnb in the Chinese market.
The strategy is currently focusing on outbound travelling
As you explore the Chinese domain of Airbnb, all the featured recommendations are from oversea travelling. This can be understood from the perspective of an example between booking.com and Ctrip(Xiecheng), a Chinese website specialized in hotel booking and travel ticket selling, which holds a large market share in China and even has its website in 13 differnet languages and regions globally. Ctrip as an integrated platform for business and leisure travel in domestic China, has developed large amount of loyal users in the past 10 years through its credit rewarding system, 24-hour service system, large expansion in Chinese cities, etc.
However, when you see the outbound hotel booking services on Ctrip, it normally provides hotels in other Asian countires or the most popular destinations for Chinese tourists, such as Paris, Sydney, or London. Booking.com as a company that has successfully entered the Chinese market for years, is especially taken the advantage to focus on outbound travelling, elegantly avoids the direct competition with Ctrip in Chinese domestic market.
As for Airbnb, there are Chinese competitors such as Tujia, Xiaozhu, Mayi which have already occupied the market even before Airbnb is known for Chinese customers. For instance, Xiaozhu has already 5 million registered users. They offer much more accommodations even in the 3rd or 4th tier cities compared with Airbnb, which has its main resources in the 1st and 2nd tier cities. Setting up a strategy targetting on outbound trip for Chinese citizens is absolutely a smart move.
For the domestic market, this article indicates some of the biggest challenges Airbnb is going to face:
The question comes, how to build up the trustworthy image among Chinese customers?
Trust can be easily ruined from a single bad experience, or even a tiny detail in the customer experience journey. While Airbnb is talking about how to build up trust through design cross-culturally, for example, letting hosts and guests writing both of their reviews before revealing them. This design is considerate and I believe it works in Chinese culture as well. Moreover, products like Alipay and Seasom credit, which are especially for Chinese trust system related to payment and personal credit are also embedded into the Chinese Airbnb website to improve the trust system.
Being in a country with almost 1.4 billion (data retrieved from http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/china-population/) population, Chinese people always have trust issues to strangers.
Airbnb has the vision of making human connections beyond transactions. It is relatively hard to realize in consideration of the diverse social hierarchies and various expectations among Chinese people. In the Ted Talk by @Joe Gebbia, he mentioned that people turn to trust people that are similar to themselves, and as a Chinese people I reckon this philosophy also applies in the Chinese market. And 10 reviews are probably not going to beat the trust of similarities in this case as forging reviews have been appeared in other c2c website a lot.
As Chinese people turn to trust and more willing to interact with other similar people, such as the Circle in WeChat, successful Chinese websites or apps always provide communities for people to share their experience either among friends or in public. From recommendations of friends or like-minded people, Chinese people seem more inclined to trust the product or service.
Is building up online community a gateway towards strengthening the trust system of Airbnb in China? Customer researches and trials need to be carried out.
I would say feeling being supported 24-hour is another important concern for Chinese customers, especially when it comes to Airbnb, with a service time span of a couple of days to months, during which might appear various problems along the way. The people need to feel that their authority is being defended. This is the kind of feeling I lost from my Airbnb experience in Beijing because of my lack of awareness of the differences between the Chinese webiste and the global website. OR maybe Airbnb could do something to improve that.
One example can be, taking fully use of the habit
What is the habit of modern Chinese people? They use Wechat everyday or even check it every single hour, no matter for chatting with friends, reviewing each other’s newest update, or reading articles from official accounts (normally owned by enterprises or organizations). Almost every Chinese to-c business opens at least one official Wechat account, either for promotion or bridging their O2O, PC to mobile services. I just randomly typed in names of some popular O2O service providers, every single one of them has deeply engaged into their Wechat account and has been providing information, activities, and even using it as a portal to provide links for their further services or mobile applications.
The habit of extracting information from Wechat is highly embedded into the daily behaviors of Chinese people, while they are pay attention to what’s happening around through this platform. When I tried to search for Airbnb, I couldn’t find any official account.
This suggestion doesn’t mean opening an official account on Wechat will take Airbnb to a competitive path. But when all the information Airbnb expects its users to know is deeply embedded into their daily routine, it becomes an efficient and low-cost promotion channel. At least from there, I know there is a customer service I can call on 24-hour basis and I am able to easily track the newest update of Airbnb China. What’s more, the integration of Wechat might provide added community value from its Friend Circle function.
What if Airbnb takes the step of changing business model based on the same product?
Airbnb has mainly opened its market in the 1st and 2nd tier cities in China. This is probably because of its main target group, foreigners who are travelling in China and Chinese youngsters who have international background.
From the strategy, it seems that Airbnb is still focusing on the outbound travelling, which targets on a tiny amount of people. The target users should firstly be aware and open for home sharing, and they should be interested in and able to afford oversea travelling.
Apart from targeting on such a small market, Airbnb must have its other plans to dig into such a big potential market.
According to a report showing the research result carried out by The People’s Bank of China and Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, the housing ownership in the 1st tier cities are much less than the other cities. For people who are under the age of 35, the percentage of housing ownership is only 59.88%. While for people who are between the age of 35 and 45, the housing ownership is 81.45%. The tricky part is normally people who are younger (let’s say under 35) are more open minded and willing to try out sharing industry. People who are elder and possessing housing resources turn to have a lot of concerns and are not willing to share spaces with strangers.
However, there are large number of people who are staying in the 1st and 2nd tier cities are from the rest of China, seeking for jobs and studying there. These groups of people have relatively open mind and curiosity to accept new things.
What’s even more, short-term stay and accommodations are in high demand among these groups. Providing short term home stay for people under the age of 35 is condiered a big market in China.
For our one-month stay in Beijing, we are lucky to rent our apartment from ziroom.com, a well-designed and organized O2O service agency targeting on youngsters who are working, interning or studying in the 1st and 2nd tier cities. They firstly have services mainly targeting on at least one year of stay, however, they are gradually opening up the market of short-term stay from the end of last year. The price is calculated by days, like it is in Airbnb, and is more expensive than renting an apartment for a whole year. However, guests get to enjoy the flexibility, as it is in Airbnb.
Based on the vision of building up human connections through Airbnb, this type of domestic short-term stay is more about a trustworthy stay for young people, so they are able to focus on what they really care about instead of wasting time dealing with accommodation issues.
By giving this example, I am not saying that this type of strategy will definitely fits into Airbnb’s China expansion.
The situation in China is unique. By saying this, I mean the common business model applied to the rest of the Airbnb market might need some twists in here.
After all, Airbnb should protect and rely on its global brand image
When it comes at the right time “bulldozing” is a good thing. It doesn’t flatten the building, it flattens the ground on which we build. — Airbnb Design Blog
The company’s vision is about building real human connections on mutual trust. It is well applied in most cases in its past expansions. I would say this brand image might also encounter challenges in China. In my experience, if everything goes well, there will be no problem at all, all satisfied. However, if any tiny disagreement happens in-between, both the host and guest are easily to loose trust. That’s why a 24-hour hotline is needed in China. From my Airbnb Expeirence in Beijing, negotiation based on trust is hard because of different standard of living conditions and the way we see problems.
However, this brand image and vision should be protected even in China, as this is one of the biggest selling point of Airbnb. As I am scrolling down the policy page on Airbnb China, the protecting rules are merely lines of sentences. According to the diversity in China, a strict standard for each point will be much more transparent and helpful in real situations.
Together with dealing potential regulatory issues with the government, it is also time for Airbnb to think about and define possible regulations to protect its brand image as well as providing guidelines for both Chinese hosts and guests.
Airbnb is absolutely doing well in the past years. As its customer who has benefited from it, and as a designer and researcher who has been curious about Airbnb’s experience design, I would definitely like to see how the product team and researchers bulldozing the Chinese ground and building up the Chinese skyscraper of Airbnb.
You’re welcome to share your thoughts and insights with me. And click the ❤️ if you like the post. :)
