My AirBNB Story & Tips on becoming a Superhost

This is an article I wrote last weekend. Since then it has been picked up by Business Insider, Huffington Post and a few other news outlets.

I hope you get some benefit from it. :wink:

Share the links to the articles rather than your website and maybe we’ll read it. Otherwise you’re obviously just trying to attract traffic to your website.

Ok. I read the article. It says you often speak at events to hosts of airbnb, which says to me you are a promoter of the company - you even have a strange reward the likes of which I’ve never seen. If you do all this work for free because you feel this billion dollar company needs the charity, I would eat every hat in my collection. And I have quite a lot of hats. Otherwise you are another one of these people trying to cash in on being a ‘guru’ somehow by teaching people how to be hosts, and have a product to sell. I didn’t go to your website because it kept crashing.

It’s all well and good to be trying to make a living however you like, but the picture you create is like company propaganda. It’s a rosy picture that omits any downsides, although we know people are having major issues all over with airbnb. Take for instance all the experiences that show airbnb removes reviews that might scare off potential guests or hosts? I personally had airbnb do this to my only negative review. You don’t mention any downsides to opening your home to 700 strangers.

Having lived in Singapore for two years, and visited Hong Kong, I know how cheap the maids are there. Dirt cheap. I even had maids quarters in my condo in Singapore. It was barely larger than a toilet room (and uglier), and apparently luxurious by normal standards as told to us by our RE). I wouldn’t house a dog in there. So while you have cheap labor to do all your work, people in countries where ‘almost slavery’ has been abandoned will not be in the same position at all.

Hello Sandy,

I appreciate your feedback and sorry that you didn’t find any benefit from my article.

Let me get right to the brass of your message.

  1. I do not work for AirBNB other than being a host, period.

  2. The article is not hosted on my website, but on Medium.com, a public platform where anyone can post, and it was my first blog post ever. It is a personal post written by me about by experience as a host, and tips to other hosts to use as they get started. It went a bit viral which was an unexpected surprise.

  3. Yes, I speak at events out of the goodness of my heart and benefit of the community. I have never been paid to do so. The events are usually workshops to help new AirBNB hosts get started. Of course AirBNB does not need charity, but who does need help are new hosts that are just getting started to earn extra income. I also give my time in many other local communities, not related to AirBNB at all. I do not find helping or giving my time an oddity.

  4. My picture may be different than yours. Strange as it sounds, I have not had any bad experiences with guests, the worst would be having to wait up until 2 or 3AM to let guest in because of a late flight arrival, or sometimes some guests are quite loud.

  5. Regarding helpers. I pay my helper 3x the average salary local salary, and lives in a regular bedroom within the house, and is just as nice as the guest rooms.

All the best,

Kelly

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Kelly,

That’s great you think hosting for airbnb is such a great and safe way to encourage people to earn extra income. It is true your experience is entirely different to mine. In fact, I can’t even imagine hosting 700 guests through my home in such a short period of time. I would feel like I had turned my home into a hostel. Perhaps the only reason it is not such an issue for you, is because you have a live in maid to do all the work hosts in other countries have to do themselves. It sounds like you don’t even have clue how much work that is. You may pay her 3x the local salary, but again, all those Indonesian and Philippino imports are little more than slave labor there. Do you honestly think in the rest of the world we keep live in maids? People that ‘require extra income’ that is? Ridiculous. Only the top 1% of the worlds rich might have maids elsewhere, where laws protect the poor, and you can be sure - they don’t need to be using airbnb.

I truly believe your article is one sided and not at all picking up on the reality of what many hosts or guests experience when using airbnb. But then again, is it your maid that really hosts the guests, seeing as she’s the one that’s really home all the time? Perhaps she could get a gig on the paid airbnb speaking circuit :laughing:

For those interested in wages for ‘helpers’, they are trying to get it to about US$145 a week for a full time live in working six days a week. They are expected to clean, sometimes cook, take care of pets, children, anything you’d like really. In the US, I pay $20 per hour, which means with that amount I could get just six hours of cleaning, quite different to the six days there. And by the way, these are the wages HOPED for. Most aren’t getting near that amount yet.

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I just looked at this thread. According to the links I followed, Kelly is no longer a Airbnb host. His account was terminated unilaterally by Airbnb without explanation. I guess that’s what you get for thinking a large corporation is your friend. @KellyKampen, did you ever get an explanation for this?

And also, a compelling reason, if one was needed, for not being solely dependent on one site or service.

Regards, Faheem Mitha

In India, at least, US$145 a week would be munificent. Domestic workers don’t get anything like that. And abuse (often extreme abuse) is rampant.