Skift Take
Given the popularity of alternative accommodations providers like Airbnb, should the hospitality industry rethink its definitions of hospitality and service? What can hotels learn from Airbnb about delivering hospitality and, by contrast, what is Airbnb learning from hotels? Here’s what Airbnb Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy Chip Conley had to say about hospitality’s continuous evolution.
What is hospitality? How do you define it, and more importantly, how do you deliver it?
Those are two questions at the heart of the multi-billion-dollar hospitality industry as a whole, and two questions Chip Conley has tried to answer in his work at Airbnb.
“In the three-and-a-half years I’ve been there, I’ve been trying to define hospitality for our company,” he said on stage at the Skift Global Forum in New York City. He later noted, "When I arrived [at Airbnb], they didn't have hospitality standards."
Crediting famed restauranteur Danny Meyer, Conley said, “Service is defined as a technique that’s offered, usually from a manual. It’s from the head. Hospitality is something that gives the person who receives it a feeling, and it usually comes from the heart. It’s generosity of spirit that comes from the heart. It’s an open heart approach to the service as you welcome people into your homes.”
As head of global hospitality and strategy for Airbnb and as a boutique hotelier (he founded Joie de Vivre Hotels and still owns 14 hotels), Conley is transforming how the $30-billion tech platform approaches hospitality, primarily by adapting what he’s learned as a hotelier.
And here’s the thing: As reluctant both the hotel industry and Airbnb might be to acknowledge each other’s similarities, their shared roots in hospitality can’t be denied.
“I just think, as a boutique hotelier, Airbnb is just a logical global extension of what the boutique hotel was,” he said. As Airbnb continues to grow, it has to “get better at the standard set — how you deliver something.”
Conley acknowledged that as Airbnb grows, it must, in its own way, adhere to standards of service and hospitality. But there’s one difference, he said. “I don’t think boutique hotels or Airbnb can ever be as consistent as
