Airbnb Moves Into Asia With Plans For Regional Headquarters And Local Customer Service

By: Kevin Green  |   November 22nd, 2012   |   Business, Living, News

Airbnb, a leading peer-to-peer rental service provider, made public their plans to develop local customer support branches in Asia. Co-founder and CTO of the startup, Nathan Blecharczyk, also stated that his firm could easily get 2 million properties in Asia for their portfolio.

 

Currently, Airbnb has a total of 250,000 properties in their network worldwide. 20,000 of these properties are located in Asia and Blecharczyk thinks that by adding offices in Australia, Thailand and Indonesia they will be able to increase these numbers significantly. He adds that, “We have 20,000 properties across Asia, it could be a lot more than that, it could be 200,000 or 2 million very easily in the future. We’re the best solution outside of Asia, there’s no other site that has such a broad selection, but one of the things we want to work on is increasing that 20,000 number.”

 

He also adds that, “We’re looking at the potential of the big travel hubs in Asia, which includes all the typical big cities as well as vacation destinations.”

 

Offices in Australia have already gotten started and the Thailand and Indonesia locations will be ready by the end of the year with a local customer support agents and a hotline. Blecharczyk says the company is looking at other destination and hopes to get other location that have potential for growth. He states that, “Malaysia, Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore are the kinds of places where we have lots of inventories and see lots of opportunities too.”

 

Singapore may be good option for the company’s head quarters in the region and Airbnb has been carefully picking the countries they do business in to keep up their growth. Thailand is one such destination and Blecharczyk explains that, “The numbers in Thailand — 1,300 properties, of which 400 are in Bangkok — are relatively modest, but the growth has been really big. We’ve seen a 275 percent increase in number of travelers there and it’s gotten to a point where it’s meaningful to invest further. This is happening because Thailand is such a well-known international destination.”

 

The startup does not expect to have any large advertising campaigns in the Asian market place because the Airbnb CTO explains that, “In the early days, people from around the world came to New York and then, after using Airbnb, they went back to their countries of origin and took the idea with them. A lot of times the guests became hosts, they were telling their friends, and this created cross-pollination and quickly seeded the global market for us; we’ve had properties in Thailand and elsewhere from the very beginning.”

 

Airbnb is not concerned about competition in Asia even with recent competitor’s joining the market. Blecharczyk  states that, “Obviously our success has been very public and inspired people to open similar businesses. This is a service that works better at scale, we just have an order of magnitude and greater scale,” he says. “I think it’s going to be very difficult for anyone else to gain significant traction given our size. With that scale we’ve been able to provide and overall streamlined product — such as better customer support — it’s all around the consumer benefits.”

 

Source: The Next Web