Airbnb is taking advantage of its users, but decentralized alternatives are possible

Anyone who uses Airbnb knows that the company is standing still as the forerunner of Home Sharing Economy 1.0, but its dominance depends on the exploitation of hosts and guests who actually share and create value. The guest paid too much and the host paid too little. The resulting situation is similar to feudalism, making the master a serf, renting out the house, keeping it clean, dealing with guests, and doing practical work. However, the value generated by Airbnb’s peer-to-peer transactions is directly attributable to shareholders who are far away from the field operations. This is tantamount to an injustice.

The reason for this is simple. It is imperative that Web 2.0 sharing economies like Airbnb and Uber are forced to enter the so-called extraction. In the early days of these platforms, they align with users on both sides of the market and treat the two as partners to initiate network effects—similar to providing early subsidies to attract people to the platform. The peer-to-peer element of the sharing economy is placed at the forefront and center of brand marketing. It seems that populist acquisitions of the tourism industry are in progress.

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Web 2.0 sharing economy

It didn’t take long for us to realize that this vision of the sharing economy was a lie. Web 2.0 companies are driven by a model of going public at all costs, when they will be constrained by shareholders who want to profit from this growth. In order to satisfy this model, these companies are forced to obtain as much profit as possible from users who transact in their markets in order to appease shareholders and other stakeholders who are not actually users themselves.

While touting the myth of empowerment and peer-to-peer sharing, platforms like Airbnb are now at odds with their users because they need to get as much from them as possible to maximize profits and ensure their survival. For example, Airbnb changed from alignment of conscience to complete dislocation, which had a knock-on effect across the market.

A prime example of the imbalance in the family sharing economy is the measures Airbnb has taken in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic and its harmful effects on global travel. In order to retain as many customers as possible, Airbnb unilaterally changed the cancellation and refund policy to benefit the guests, while pushing the burden of disinfection measures and last-minute cancellations to the landlord. This is a measure driven entirely by profit and loss margins. It prioritizes the needs of guests rather than the needs of hosts, because in the final analysis, guests are users who drive revenue. However, hosts that provide income-driven assets find themselves at a loss, and as a result a gap of mistrust has appeared.

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To make matters worse, most Web 2.0 sharing economies like Airbnb are not operating on a solid foundation. Their number is very large, and their business model has not yet been confirmed. They have to raise countless rounds of financing to continue to grow, while reducing the value they provide to the user community. As existing companies strengthen their control over control and profit extraction, a critical point is imminent.

Decentralization is the key

Users know that they are being used-they just need a viable alternative. So how do we solve the need for extraction, the intermediaries that transfer value from value creators to wealthy shareholders, and the lack of trust and agency that landlords and tenants endure when interacting with platforms such as Airbnb? The answer is a decentralized market provided and managed by users as a device rather than a squeezing cartel with unicorn dreams.

Home sharing is an ideal place for a decentralized market, because travel is one of the largest industries in the world, and anyone with a home or travel route can participate. The underlying technology and infrastructure of the blockchain are now sufficiently scalable to meet the needs of such a market.Although the COVID-19 pandemic Present With the setbacks of the tourism industry, we have seen the return of a large amount of demand, which will only grow with the development of trends such as remote work, digital nomadism and alternative accommodation.

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If Airbnb is a feudal country, then the decentralized home-sharing market is a shared, democratic economy, in which value-creating people retain value. They can establish better coordination between guests, landlords and the markets they trade. The person who actually uses the platform is the person who makes the decision, which directly loops into the value capture mechanism of the platform.

Built on the blockchain infrastructure, it provides a proven model for the peer-to-peer market, with powerful built-in token economics, and the decentralized alternative to the travel industry is here. This means family sharing 2.0, Web 3.0 travel reservations, and an end to the exploitation of hosts and guests around the world.

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