01_Intro

This was a six-week research project working with Airbnb to understand hosts' experiences and defined user archetypes. There are two major user groups of Airbnb, guests who want to find a place to stay and hosts who want to make money by renting out available space. There are abundant research materials available in hospitality industry about traveler, including those who use Airbnb; however, hosts, a more unique and less discussed group, requires equal understanding to thrive Airbnb's business. This research project aimed to identify different Airbnb host archetypes and the different stages of their career. We wanted to understand hosts’ motivation and challenges and point out strategic advice to improve their experience.

02_research methods

Primary research

We conducted ethnographic research with 8 Airbnb hosts and 1 design researcher from Airbnb in 6 weeks. In order to cover Airbnb host in a broader spectrum and different levels of experience, we carefully chose our interview participants including one-time, short-term and full-time hosts, and also people who own their houses as well as people who sublease their rooms. Our participants also included a regional manager of a vacation rental company who manages 30 listings.

Our research approaches included on-site and phone interviews, a self-documentation by a host, and a self-participation by our team member. We also conducted secondary research to read all guest reviews on our research subjects’ pages and calculated the frequency of key themes. In the end of our research process, we also interviewed with an Airbnb design researcher to understand Airbnb’s business goals and focus area of hosts using their platform.

Interview Guidelines

Research Participants

Shadowing: In order to understand Airbnb hosts' everyday lives, we shadowed one of our host participants to record his daily activities by taking photos and writing note. After that we interviewed with him to learn the story behind each activity.

Secondary research

Guest review: There are many interesting topics we can learn from the guest reviews, such as the quality of hospitality and stay experience. We carefully documented all of the guest comments and hosts' replies and identified key themes like ‘location’, ‘looks like picture’, ‘friendly’ and ‘clean’ are the most mentioned words.

03_Analysis and synthesis

Theme clusters

We debriefed our learnings from research with each other each week. All themes were captured and clustered on the wall so as to help generate insights and host's experience model.

host archetypes

We picked up repeated themes from early researches and generated a list of spectrums that described a variety of hosts' attributes. We mixed the list and created several 2x2 matrixes with an attempt to bring meaning to host categories. We ended up defining host archetypes by using hosts' level of commitment, including money, time and efforts put into providing hospitality service for guests, and their attitudes toward house rental business. There were four major categories, Rental management user, Entrepreneur, Short-term lease and House owner.

host journey map

We created a journey map to communicate the experience of being an Airbnb host. In the journey, there are six stages from motivation, preparation, onboard, evaluation, improvement to contribution, a curve that demonstrates hosts' emotional levels, and themes highlighted in pink box.

Expert Interview

We interviewed with an Airbnb design researcher, Chris, to share and get feedbacks on our host archetypes and the host journey map. We also learned tremendous insights of Airbnb’s challenges of retaining hosts on the platform and the business focus. This expert interview helped us refine the host archetypes and journey map and many learnings were translated into the insights.

04_Insights and suggestions