Airbnb changed the way we look at temporary accommodation, whether for work or play. The San Francisco-based company, set up by Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk in 2008, is diversifying into ever more lucrative niches. Alongside targeted new ventures such as Airbnb "Experiences", "Plus" and "Collections", the company has now launched Airbnb Luxe, providing "access to unique and spectacular properties with... bespoke experiences and services to make every stay truly magical".
The trigger for the division was the company’s $300 million (£240m) acquisition of Luxury Retreats in 2017. The latter site dates to the early days of the web, set up in a bedroom in 1999 by a 17-year old designer. That founder, Canadian Joe Poulin, is now Airbnb’s vice-president of luxury, overseeing more than 2,000 "handpicked homes" around the world.
Luxe offers a blend of high-end travel agent and luxury concierge (as well as being a new portal for virtual tourism for the rest of us), tapping into the minted millennial’s expectations of an entirely curated life. Whereas Airbnb blew up on the power of crowd-sourced listings, reviews and a powerful search system, it lacks the personal touch of expertise and engagement that the truly wealthy feel entitled to. So the company has overlaid these creamed off listings with a light dusting of add-on services and the availability of a dedicated "trip designer", who can sort everything from travel itineraries to theatre tickets, grocery deliveries, chefs and drivers.
So how does one assemble a Luxe portfolio? The Luxury Retreats acquisition included many staff, including Nick Guezen, now Airbnb’s director of portfolio strategy at Luxe. It is Guezen who developed a much-vaunted 300-point checklist for Luxe rentals. "The criteria ensures every property meets a set of strict standards," Guezen explains. "These range from chef-grade appliances to the proper amount of bathrooms corresponding to each bedroom."
Other elements are more subjective. As Guezen notes: "We are evaluating homes on several criteria across the categories of form, function, feel, location and services." In practical terms, this means a lot of professionally shot and artfully styled residences: an angular modernist house looming out of the verdant New Zealand hills, white-walled London mews houses, beachside villas adjoining swathes of white sand and clear blue seas in such destinations as Antigua, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the Hollywood Hills, Tuscany, Cape Town, Bali and Marrakesh.
Luxury Retreats is still a going concern, and the Luxe list is winnowed down from its more than 5,000 listings to a more manageable 2,000-plus homes, all of which meet the enhanced Luxe criteria. "We designed an approach that allowed us to identify those properties worthy of joining the platform while still being entirely unique and appropriate to their particular destination," Guzeen says. As a result, Luxe properties are usually visual shorthand for their respective high-end archetypes: the modernist seaside box; the contemporary town house; the fur-strewn ski lodge; the private island.
Back in the real world, Murray Cox established the website Inside Airbnb with designer John Morris as a kind of data-driven activism, diving deeper into Airbnb's impact on rental markets around the world by dovetailing its listings with other public data to provide a snapshot of how the service changes cities. "At the moment, Inside Airbnb doesn't specifically identify Luxe listings," Cox says, musing that discovering the proportional split between regular and Luxe would be an interesting statistical exercise. "Anecdotally, I've noticed that some markets, both in the city, and in regional areas have high-priced/luxury Airbnb listings," he adds. "I don't think they're doing it as a form of advertising, or developing their brand, I think they're simply trying to segment their supply/demand to develop that market and look for greater profits."
Technology-driven luxury is extremely adept at serving up these bite-size morsels of curated individuality. They are designed to entice. "One of my favourite homes is called Alang Alang in the south of France," Guerzen recalls. "I had the opportunity to visit that home last year and while it is just as incredible as any other home on our platform, it has two unique features. In the main entrance of the home, there is a lifesized T-Rex skull (one on only four privately owned in the world). The home also contains a full-sized boxing ring that I had the fortune of enjoying for a few rounds."
The company notes that in 2018, bookings for $1,000-per-night properties rose by 60 per cent. Many Luxe locations can command substantially more. "We have so many unique properties, but the one that always comes to mind first is the private atoll, Nukutepipi," says Guezen of the French Polynesian island that can accommodate 52 people and comes with its own observatory, spa, extensive staff and even its own time zone. It’s owned by Guy Laliberté, co-founder of the Cirque du Soleil (who allegedly envisioned it as a sanctuary from unspecified global catastrophe).
Overall, however, the majority of Luxe’s listings would not be out of place in a high-end travel agent, bringing Airbnb’s undeniable convenience and accessibility to a sector that currently ignores all but the one per cent. Luxe is a head-first leap into the digital commodification of exclusivity, the burgeoning sense that we’re all deserving of luxury, if only for a couple of nights. Private islands are a long way from air mattresses, but online, everything scales.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
