AIRBNB LUXE_
Staying in styleAirbnb changed the way we look at
temporary accommodation, whether
for work or play. Now the San Francisco-
based company, set up by Brian Chesky,
Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk
in 2008, is diversifying its offerings:
alongside ventures such as Airbnb
“Experiences”, “Plus” and “Collections”,
the company has launched Airbnb
Luxe, providing “access to unique and
spectacular properties with... bespoke
experiences and services”.
The trigger was the company’s $300
million (£240m) acquisition of Luxury
Retreats in 2017. The latter site dates
to the early days of the web, set up
in a bedroom in 1999 by a 17-year-old
designer. That founder, Canadian Joe
Poulin, is now Airbnb’s vice-president
of luxury, overseeing more than 2,000
“handpicked homes” around the world.
Luxe offers a blend of high-end travel
agent and luxury concierge (as well as
being a new portal for virtual tourism for
the rest of us), tapping into the minted
millennial’s expectations of an entirely
curated life. Whereas Airbnb blew up on
the power of crowd-sourced listings,
reviews and a powerful search system,
it lacks the personal touch of expertise
and engagement that the truly wealthy
feel entitled to. So the company has
overlaid these creamed off listings
with a light dusting of add-on services
and the availability of a dedicated “tripdesigner”, who can sort everything
from travel itineraries to theatre tickets,
grocery deliveries, chefs and drivers.
So how does one assemble a Luxe
portfolio? The Luxury Retreats acqui-
sition included many staff, including
Nick Guezen, now Airbnb’s director of
portfolio strategy at Luxe. It is Guezen
who developed the much-vaunted
300-point checklist for Luxe rentals.
“The criteria ensure properties meet a
set of strictly held standards,” Guezen
explains. “From chef-grade appliances
to the proper amount of bathrooms.”
Other elements are more subjective.
As Guezen notes: “We’re evaluating
form, function, feel, location, services.”
Luxury Retreats is still a going
concern, and the Luxe list is winnowed
down from its more than 5,000 listings
to 2,000-plus homes, all of which
meet the enhanced Luxe criteria. “We
designed an approach that allowed us to
identify properties worthy of joining the
platform, while still being entirely unique
and appropriate to their particular desti-
nation,” Guezen says. As a result, Luxe
properties are usually visual shorthand
for their respective high-end arche-
types: the modernist seaside box;
the contemporary town house; the
fur-strewn ski lodge; the private island.
Back in the real world, Murray Cox
established the website Inside Airbnb
with designer John Morris, as a kind
of data-driven activism, deep-diving
into Airbnb’s impact on rental markets
around the world by dovetailing its
listings with other public data to
provide a snapshot of how the service
changes cities. “At the moment, Inside
Airbnb doesn’t specifically identify Luxe
listings,” Cox says, musing that discov-
ering the proportional split between
regular and Luxe would be an inter-
esting statistical exercise. “Anecdotally,
I’ve noticed that some markets, both
in the city and in regional areas, have
high-priced/luxury Airbnb listings,” headds. “I don’t think they’re doing it as a
form of advertising, or developing their
brand. I think they’re trying to segment
their supply/demand to develop that
market and seek greater profits.”
Technology-driven luxury is
extremely adept at serving up these
bite-size morsels of curated individu-
ality. They are designed to entice. “One
of my favourite homes is called Alang
Alang in the south of France,” Guerzen
recalls. “I had the opportunity to visit
that home last year, and while it is just
as incredible as any other home on our
platform, it has a unique feature: in the
main entrance of the building, there
is a genuine fossil T-Rex skull (one of
only four privately owned in the world).”
Luxe is a head-first leap into the
digital commodification of exclu-
sivity, the burgeoning sense that
everyone deserves luxury, even if only
for a couple of nights. Private islands
are a long way from air mattresses,
but online, everything scales.063Left: the Te Kanu residency on Lake
Wanaka, New Zealand (£2,029 per
night). Below: Nukutepipi in French
Polynesia (from €900,000 a week)WORDS: JONATHAN BELL; PHOTOGRAPHY: TREVOR TONDRO| | | | | | | || | | | | | | || | | | | | | || | | | | | | || | | | | | | || | | | | | | || | | | | | | || | | | | | | || | | | | | | || | | | | | | || | | | | | | || | | | | | | || | | | | | | || | | | | | | |11-19-GEgearoftheyear.indd 63 18/09/2019 14:20