The kinds of users who flock to Airbnb and Vayable are looking for something unique that can't be found in a Lonely Planet guidebook, company executives say. They want to feel connected to the community they're visiting by staying in a quaint Vermont tree house or spending their trip taking surf lessons in Hilo instead of just shacking up at the local—generic—Holiday Inn.
"There is a sense of we're all a part of something new," Wong says. "They're hoping to build this. They have sense of ownership over platform and community."
Vayable likes to keep tabs on its users to create more than business relationships.
"We use Facebook groups, keep regular correspondence, build relationships with our guides," she says. "It almost becomes that type of relationship you have with a friend who may not be in your day-to-day life. You're following their story from afar."
Airbnb, which recently launched a similar concierge service to provide that "live like a local" experience, encourages users to go beyond just the renter-rentee relationship.
"We put a lot of emphasis on creating features that build trust within the community so people can feel comfortable bringing these online relationships offline," says Brian Chesky, the company's CEO and co-founder.
Creating a Smaller World
From Airbnb down to Taskrabbit, all the entrepreneurs talk about making the world smaller again and creating an economy where people trust each other's assessments of a product or service, instead of just relying on corporate marketing. While they all lead the charge, they all expect the market to get more crowded in the near future.
"This is sort of the next wave of the Internet: access over ownership of items," Busque says. "This isn't a site like Craigslist you just go to and hope for the best."
The companies want these transactions to feel like doing business with a trusted friend instead of an Internet stranger. Take the Vayable story, for example: While working as a field reporter and researcher for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Wong used her nine weeks of vacation—spent on a slim budget—to collect unique travel experiences. For instance, she went to Panama and helped friends build a house in exchange for a free place to stay. It was an adventure not found on booking sites such as Expedia or Travelocity.
"The most special memorable amazing experiences were always through connections and people I met," she says. Soon, friends and family began asking her for trip ideas, which lead her to set up a blog of elaborate directions and clues for maximizing a travel experience: clues like which dirt road to walk down to find a specific person to talk to in a certain small shop. "It was not the most efficient way," she says. From there, Vayable was born.
Each is meant to go deeper into an experience than your average tour bus. So instead of taking a Sex and The City group tour with a dozen others, you could book a "Do SoHo with your gay BFF" tour and get a unique, more intimate look at the South of Houston neighborhood of New York City.
What Exactly do Customers Trust Online?
In the early days of eBay, winning bidders had users' rankings to gauge their trustworthiness, but those users were still mostly hidden behind anonymous screen names. In the pre-PayPal days, you were forced to send a money order to get your item.
But the change in technological platforms for digital payment, social connectivity, mobile apps, and location-based services has pulled back the curtain on much of the anonymity online.
Many of these new sites incorporate Facebook connectivity so you can see that your Facebook or LinkedIn friends have booked a room or rental home through Airbnb, or whether you have a mutual friend with someone renting office space through Loosecubes.
The Airbnb community can see just how they're connected to each other," Chesky says. "Travelers can filter their search results to see places their friends have reviewed, as well as their connections to hosts through mutual friendships, direct friendships, and school affiliations."
Now, with savvy users becoming more accustomed to having an online presence visible even to perfect strangers, customers get the sense they're dealing with real people, not anonymous spambots.
"That's kind of the magic sauce for making the connection," Thomas says. "It's elevating that connection: 'Hey, you and this other person are mutual friends with the host, this may be more of the vibe you're looking for.' There's an additional layer of comfort knowing you are socially connected to someone."
All of the sites incorporate some sort of review system where users can rate their experiences, suggest improvements and otherwise help inform future perspective users.
"It provides an added layer of security," Wong says. "People got very, very comfortable with technology. It helped create a lot more checks online, buying through established marketplaces."
"Deeper Economic Forces at Work"
Entrepreneurs say they see signs of deeper economic forces at work that could shift more people away from buying brand-new or pre-packaged products. The idea behind collaborative consumption is to take advantage of all the under-utilized space, cars, homes, and people in the world, instead of marching into Target or the nearest new-car dealer.
"There's kind of a good-will aspect there. People like to say that they share. It feels good," Thomas says. "They are really buying into this idea of trusting the members of the community."
The founders of Getaround had this in mind in 2009 when starting its service that lets people rent out their own vehicles when not in use. With 250 million cars in the country sitting around for a cumulative 5.6 billion unused hours, they predicted a future where car ownership would be replaced by highly computerized vehicles and shared transportation.
"We don't have magic technology today, but we do have a lot of cars that aren't in use," CEO Sam Zaid says. "It doesn't make sense for 10 families on a street to each have a Suburban, each have a pickup truck. At some point it just make sense to share certain aspects when you don't need them all the time."
This kind of consumption appeals to consumers for both economic and environmental reasons, Thomas says.
"For us, it's obviously maximizing office space that's not being fully utilized," she says. "Why don't you save on gas and not commute 40 miles away? If you're a business owner, why not rent a couple desks to support an office overall?"
