When I learned about Airbnb, I was like, 'Wow, this is an amazing, new way to travel; it's about community, and there's a lot to figure out to clear the way,' so I was really drawn to that.
The next wave of the social graph is empowering services like Airbnb and Lyft that give people the chance to have that physical interaction. People are more open to that because of Airbnb. Airbnb took couch surfing and took an additional step.
Travel magazines are just one cupcake after another. They're not about travel. The travel magazine is, in fact, about the opposite of travel. It's about having a nice time on a honeymoon, or whatever.
No hotels have gone out of business because of Airbnb... Airbnb is not a perfect substitute for a hotel. We excel at different things.
There's always room for an operator like Airbnb, but it's quite a different thing to my serviced apartments. Airbnb is a different market - it has nothing to do with me.
We actually distribute using AirBnB because they're the vacation management company and they distribute us, which is why AirBnB is also a small shareholder in our company.
Unlike some of the time-travel movies I love, like 'Primer' or '12 Monkeys,' 'Looper' is not about time travel. It's about this situation that time travel creates and the people dealing with that situation. So narratively, the big challenge was to have time travel get out of the way.
We looked into and tested the Airbnb website and found the inquiries generated were at price points substantially lower than the market is prepared to pay us directly. It was clear that there were no real synergies between the level of our offering and what Airbnb clientele is looking for.
Early investors in Uber and Airbnb, though they remain private companies, have valued them at stratospheric multiples based largely on the notion that Uber will transform and dominate local transportation and Airbnb will revolutionize the hotel industry.
In Japan, there's a TV series called Jin. It deals with time travel. I like stories about time travel. It's a story about people living in modern day that travel back to the Edo era. Those things really interest me.
Travel books are all sorts - some are autobiographies, some are about falling in love. Some are about having great meals, some are about suffering. There are as many different kinds of travel books as there are novels. People think a travel book is one thing. It's many things.
Airbnb is about the nexus of the online and offline to create the perfect customer experience.
But if I get some time off, I want to travel. It's always about travel, about getting away from everything.
Talking to hosts and asking them, 'What does Airbnb mean to you?'... I get amazingly heartfelt stories about the people that they met, about the money that they earned, about the mindset of empowerment they got through this and how they then applied that to their own business.
He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.
You mean old books?" "Stories written before space travel but about space travel." "How could there have been stories about space travel before --" "The writers," Pris said, "made it up.