Skift Take
There's really no broad stroke definition for what an authentic travel experience is. It means different things in different places and travel brands need to consider what their definition is to avoid generalizing.
Jonathan Mildenhall will speak about leveraging cultural ideology to create a super-brand in travel at the Skift Global Forum on October 14 and 15 in Brooklyn, New York. See the complete list of amazing speakers and topics at this year's event.
We recently caught up with Mildenhall to get his perspective on what authentic travel experiences actually mean in a world where virtually every brand claims to offer them. As CMO of Airbnb —one of the world's largest home-sharing sites — the company built itself on the promise that its guests would receive authentic, local experiences in hosts' homes that hotels don't have the power to replicate.
It's becoming more difficult to find a hospitality brand that doesn't promise guests some kind of authentic experience during their stay, and with that the definition of authenticity has become somewhat convoluted, Mildenhall argues. A guest attending a wedding at a hotel in New York City will get the authentic experience for that particular hotel but that doesn't mean the hotel is helping guests discover the local culture and people, he says.
Mildenhall joined Airbnb in June 2014 and was tasked with making the company into the world’s first community-driven super-brand. He has more than 20 years experience working in creative ad agencies on high profile brands such as Audi, General Motors, Guinness and PlayStation. When Airbnb hired him, Mildenhall was vice president of global advertising strategy and creative at Coca Cola, where he oversaw the creation of Coke’s most awarded marketing platform in its history.
An edited version of the conversation follows:
Skift: There have been other huge companies that tried to create a super-brand but failed. How will Airbnb be different?
Jonathan Mildenhall: Let me first talk about Mary Meeker's Internet report that was published two months ago and shows that there is only one brand that occupies a position on both lists of most valued tech brands in 1995 and 2015 and that is Appl
