Airbnb: China is the next leading market for home sharing services

The world-leading home-sharing service, Airbnb, experienced a big boom in China. For the past 12 months, the number of Chinese guests renting Airbnb homes abroad more than doubled, and bookings for domestic homes also significantly surged compared with a year before.

The company’s co-founder, also the newly announced chairman of Airbnb China, Nathan Blecharczyk said China is to become the number one guest source for Airbnb by 2020.

To accomplish that, Airbnb will keep providing leading customer service to Chinese users, including Mandarin services, building local customer centers, using China’s social media platforms to help customers, and launch more value-added products according to Chinese holidays.

“We are hiring 150 people in China at the start of this year, to offer service from within, for all Chinese users in China or traveling abroad,” said Blecharczyk.

Airbnb currently has about four million homes registered in 192 countries, but its biggest focus in terms of global expansion is China.

However, home-sharing, as Blecharczyk said, is a whole new industry category that lacks proper regulation in many countries, China included.

And maybe China should be pacing up modifying relative policies, like its neighbor Japan did. The Japanese Senate this June voted to legalize and regulate home-renting targeting individual travelers.

The new law says that whoever rents their spare home to travelers must have his or her property registered first at local government and that the homes would have a maximum rental time of 180 days per year, to ensure proper living conditions in the neighborhood.

Homes for rent in one of Chinese people’s favorite vacation spot – Bali, Indonesia. The homes are priced in RMB and, as shown, are relatively affordable to ordinary travelers.

Blecharczyk noted that the Asia-Pacific region is where Chinese people most frequently travel, with Japan being their top destination. Airbnb in 2016 has helped generate 28 billion US dollars of income for people in the region, with 370 thousand extra jobs created.

That in part has encouraged Airbnb to focus more on the APEC nations. The company announced on Thursday at the Vietnam APEC CEO Summit to invest two million US dollars in supporting innovative tourism projects in the region.

(CGTN)