Are Airbnb getting a bit desperate in their marketing for new hosts? Latest carrot being dangled to us is €680 to refer someone, equates to roughly $760.
JF
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It must depend on the market. Here I am only being offered $120.
Wow! That’s actually significant. I’m offered the same as KKC. I’ve seen at least 3 different amounts since I started hosting. $120 is the highest and it includes a 20% superhost bump.
Supposedly, Airbnb’s most recent quarterly loss was due to extra marketing money, so I guess this shouldn’t be a surprise.
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The whole concept is a bit odd to me. Most of the folks I know are here in my town. Why would I want to increase competition. Recently one of my former students whose dog I now board regularly listed her house on Airbnb. She asked me about it and I gave her some info. It never crossed my mind to send her a host referral code. Ooof!
Interestingly they’ve relayed to me that it’s been harder than they thought it would be keeping up with it.
I’m in New Jersey and the offer here is only $100.
I’ve had a few over the years but I don’t think the payment has ever gone over $120? Possibly to $150? I don’t remember.
I’ve only ever referred anyone from my website, so there’s no danger of there being any local competition - I think the last one was from somewhere in India. 
Maybe they are specifically looking for more hosts in Spain/Europe?
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Or maybe they’re just looking for Super(cool)Hosts to refer 
See above.
JF
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As a Superhost or not? I’m in the Phoenix area and it’s $120 for Superhosts and $100 for everyone else.
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Probably not a coincidence, but I just saw my referral was bumped from $120 to $168. Pretty sure this happened today.
You’re right. I just went back and checked, it’s $120.
The crazy thing here is that in Feb of this year it was €425 they were offering.
There is no need for more hosts here, on Airbnb we’ve seen a 50% increase in available properties since last Autumn. Apart from the premium dates (Easter, Moto GP and the horse fair) a lot of these listings are empty. Some even had availability in August, traditionally our busiest month.
JF
My host referral is at $150 and it says that the new host will also get $20. That seems new too but maybe I never noticed it before. When I first listed I made sure that some hosts that were kind of mentoring me got the bonus but I know I didn’t get anything.
Does anyone else have specific people that they recommend to refer? For some reason there’s always the same guy at the bottom for me. He’s in Scotland and I know him from 30 years ago so I’m not even sure how they connected us.
They are posting facebook friends of mine, most of whom are former facebook friends, mostly former students of mine.
That must be it. I might have had facebook connected at one point but don’t now. It seems strange to me that it’s only this one guy and it’s always just him. He must just have SH written on his face or, more likely, they want more hosts in his area I guess.
I’m assuming they (ABB) wants to saturate areas with hosts. It’s good only for the platform, not the hosts.
I imagine any legit (permit holder) in my area is on ABB and the illegals have no interest in advertising with the absurd fines they risk.