01_Intro

7 years ago, Airbnb started as a small startup to entirely disrupt the hotel industry. Today, Airbnb's attracts more than 1.5 million listings on its platform and becomes the biggest room providers, surpassing any hotel chains, in the world. In this project, my team wants to innovate Airbnb's business model and creates more value for the guests by leveraging its existing platform.

02_Problem framing

03_User Experience

Host curates local stores for guests

Guest is able to browse and purchase items from Aircurate

Guest receives items after returning home

04_How it works

Aircurate creates an ecosystem and brings values for the major stakeholders, including hosts, guests, manufacturers, and Airbnb. In this ecosystem, Airbnb partners with manufacturers and helps hosts catalogue their existing partnering products under the rental pages. Guests can enjoy the free and long hour product trial and buy it directly through their Airbnb accounts.

05_Business Model

Aircurate charges 18% commissions of each transaction from manufacturers and shares slightly more than half with the hosts. For manufactures, the benefits are paying lower cost than the brick and mortar store and providing longer and more desirable product engagement. 

06_concept validation

To prototype and examine our the key assumptions in the business model, my team works with Airbnb hosts and created false door (Aircurate mockup pages) to acquire guests data such as penetration rate and product preference. We also conducted several interviews with hosts and guests to gain feedbacks.

01_Concept ideation

In the beginning of the project, we conducted secondary research and mapped out the information on the era map which helped us study the shifting trends and behaviors during travel. We used business model canvas, 3C(company, customer, competitor) and S.W.O.T. to analyze Airbnb's business model and then to identify the opportunity area in adding host's product curation experience to Airbnb's existing platform. 

02_user research

We conducted several rounds of host and guest interview to get feedbacks to iterate our value proposition which had changed from retailer product display, concierge service for guest, manufacturer product development and test-out, to finally host's product curation for guests.

03_hypotheses prioritization

We structured Aircurate's business model by using business model canvas and identified key hypotheses to be verified in this concept. 1. Hosts are willing to participate in Aircurate. 2. Guests who try products at Airbnb are inclined to own them. 3. Guests are willing to make purchase through Airbnb directly.

04_service prototype

We partnered with 3 Airbnb hosts and helped them build mockup webpages where they can catalogue their products curation for guests. To make it easy for guests to find out the webpage, we also designed a welcome letter to introduce Aircurate and have hosts to display it in guest rooms. We tracked google analytics to get the number of  to verify our hypotheses. During the 6 weeks micropilot, we tracked google analytics of 20 guests' activity on the webpage and had 10% click-in to review products. We also arranged an interview with a guest to get feedbacks for our concept.

05_Development roadmap