Airbnb's Australia and New Zealand country manager Susan Wheeldon was locked out the country by the pandemic. Photo / Supplied
Airbnb's Australia and New Zealand country manager Susan Wheeldon was locked out the country by the pandemic. Photo / Supplied
Airbnb's new regional boss is in New Zealand on a charm offensive, and she wants to know if you've got a spare room for the night.
"New Zealand is half my homeland, so I'm always happy to be back," she says.
The last time Susan Wheeldon was in town was on a family holiday to Waiheke, with her father and mother who is originally from Pukekohe.
But that was before becoming country manager for the website, and before a global travel shutdown.
Wheeldon has been Airbnb's manager for Australia and New Zealand for just over 17 months, so it's a huge relief to finally be crossing the Ditch on a quarantine-free flight.
With her, she is bringing a pile of changes to the website. Airbnb has made a raft of over 100 tweaks and changes to the way it runs for guests and hosts.
"As you were seeing from the Transtasman bubble data, it's obvious there is going to be some quite significant changes in the space."
A former Google executive, Wheeldon is numbers-driven by nature. However even she is taken aback at the size of Airbnb.
"You're talking about almost a billion guests checking in 94000 cities, 4 million hosts. Sometimes you forget just how much access to data that gives us."
Datasets from the New Zealand and Australia domestic rebound in particular have been at the forefront of shaping these changes.
Yet out of the 100+ changes for 1001 airbnb-ing nights, there are 10 steps which are at the centre of Airbnb's big restart:
There is now a new 'ten-step process' to listing a room on the website.
"We want to make it as easy as possible to bring supply onto the platform," says Wheeldon. There are simply not enough listings, particularly in the more regional and less urban areas that have seen a rise in popularity since the pandemic.
Airbnb wants to add as many quirky, Kiwi properties as possible: Matakana Fantail Retreat. Photo / Supplied
To do this the website has been deploying charm and some direct messaging to encourage property owners to list rooms on the platform. Anyone who has recently stayed might have been asked if they would consider joining as a host.
"One of the places we find a lot of our hosts are recent guests who've enjoyed the experience," she says.
Travel rebuild
In spreading the net wide as possible in their search for hosts, Airbnb is rebuilding for a very different kind of travel post pandemic.
Since March last year, when the most serious travel restrictions came into force, popular city destinations fell off the map. Edinburgh and Paris reported swathes of sort-term lets coming off the market as travellers disappeared.
While Airbnb's official response was that listing numbers are now "roughly the same" as before the pandemic, it will not be in crowded urban centres where the rebuild is happening.
Just looking just at the Kiwi travel rebound and sentiments, the city break has fallen out of fashion.
In recent survey 29 per cent of Airbnb's guests in New Zealand are going purposefully out of their way to find 'off-the-beaten-track' properties.
"The strength of New Zealand's domestic tourism market has been a real source of optimism for the rest of the world."
Part of the trends Wheeldon is seeing here are being replicated elsewhere, with travellers taking a gamble on a place outside the traditional tourism trail.
"In the past 12 months Kiwi Airbnb $820 million into the New Zealand economy. That is a huge amount of money that goes back into the local hospitality and into travel jobs."
Most excitingly to Wheeldon, most of this is going into places outside the established tourism infrastructure.
"I'm from a small country town in Queensland. There's 160 people and there's an Airbnb there," she says. "There would never be a hotel."
With 250 global guests to every listed property, Airbnb is in growth mode.
However this speedy on-boarding would appear contrary to the 'Covid-compliance' and quality control measures brought in during the middle of the pandemic.
Wheeldon says the have invested in some technology solutions to help find improve accuracy of listings, but it's human reviews which shape the platform.
Snazzy sounding AI tech like "computer vision" and "deep learning" are making sure descriptions match up with areas and "automatically arranges photos to get listing appeal."
Essentially it is up to guests' feedback to weed-out properties, which aren't up to standard.
At the bottom of the barrel are more superficial changes, such as prompts to return more properties in searches and localisation tweaks to add 42 languages to the platform
You can now book a holiday using the regional Spanish language of Catalonian or one of three different dialects of German.
You won't be looking for Kiwi baches on the website in te reo Māori for the time being, says Wheeldon.
