AirBnb

There are a lot of discussions about the apartment rental website Airbnb, so I decided to try it and then report my opinion in terms of web usability and customer experience.

Initially, the basic registration takes place without much problem especially if you simply want to just try and see more information about Airbnb. If we go to the next step, meaning offering your house or appartment, the process is also very acceptable and we arrive at building our page offer fairly easily. The portion for accepting payments is relatively well although it took me 2 tries and not because of the site itself, but rather due to formatting bank information provided by my bank.

Now if we pass from the side of the user wishing to rent an apartment or house, there seems to be some gaps. The most common complaints are for the validation of people including through sending scan of passport or identity card. A majority of the time, and that is what has been reported to me, the documents are not accepted, creating a frustration on the part of users and at least 25% of users abandon the process.

Another shortcoming of a customer experience point of view, the site does not allow pre visiting an apartment for those who want to see by themselves  if the reality matches the ad on the Airbnb website . This deficiency is understandable from a certain point of view since Airbnb is remunerated on contracts passed between people via the site. We understand that once people have met, there’s no need to go through the site again to do business together. For this purpose the website has some mechanisms to prevent them from publishing their contact details before accepting a formal contract, and even at this stage, Airbnb makes it possible to write through specific address to the website.

Finally on this point, there is also a so called “police” as a real person who will contact you if they suspect a little biased about using their system.

To summarize this article and at this stage of my experiment, I would give an overall rating of 8/10 as a person offering his apartment / house and 7/10 as a tenant. Of course all this is quite subjective and has not been a mandate for me in web usability and customer experience but this simply reflects my experience and that of others.
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