When someone asks you the distance between your home and your favorite location, most likely you’ll retort with an estimation, in either miles or kilometers, depending on whether your country of origin has failed to recognize the metric system or not. If you say, “10-15 miles,” this measurement is considered to be “as the crow flies,” an idiom that describes the distance if you were traveling directly from one point to the other, in a perfect line. Unless you secretly morph into a crow and fly from your apartment to the grocery, the distance between two points on a map is not exact.
This has no bearing on your life if you’re traveling to a city where you speak the native tongue and/or have some geographical sense of where you are in the world, but let’s say, for sake of argument, that you decide to travel to northern Mongolia and can’t seem to find your Airbnb. If Google (GOOG) translate tells you that the stranger you stopped on the sign of the road said you’re 15 miles from your location, you may start to humor sleeping in the Mongolian wilderness, but fear not, Airbnb knew you’d feel this way and has a solution.
Airbnb announced on Monday that they are partnering with what3words, a geocoding startup with a mapping platform that divided the world into 57 trillion 3m x 3m squares on a massive grid, and assigned each square with a unique 3-word address. What3words was founded in 2013 with the goal of easing the stress faced by world travelers to find easily find their way to various locations around the world. In the name of science and my personal childlike bewilderment, I downloaded what3words’ IOS app and plugged in “Empire State Building” to see what the 3-word location would be for the national monument, and I found that the building is located at “///trying.vibes.ruled”
The company behind geographical gridding platform partnered with Airbnb to help travelers, specifically those looking to “home share” with Dukha reindeer herders at their constantly moving campsite in the mountains of northern Mongolia. The incredible story, posted on the what3words site, describes the life of Zorigt and his wife Otgonbayar, two reindeer herders living in the Taiga snow forest of Mongolia, and how what3words and Airbnb helped them gift world travelers with an unforgettable stay amidst the nomadic Dhuka tribe.
According to TechCrunch, the Airbnb listing of Zorigt and Otgonbayar’s “home share” offers guests the chance to sleep in a teepee in the middle of the northern Mongolian forest, with guests getting “two wooden beds, sleeping bags, and an open-fire stove for heating and cooking, as well as fun access to the reindeer tribe’s backyard.” With the integration of what3word’s mapping platform, guests can locate the nomadic tribe using the three-word address provided by the tribe via the what3words mobile application.
“In Mongolia, a lack of traditional street addressing and nomadic way of life have prevented locals from welcoming Airbnb guests into their homes. Our partnership delivers an innovative way to provide hosts with an accurate and reliable address while constantly on the move, and creates new livelihood opportunist for nomadic and rural communities in Mongolia…”
–Cameron Sinclair, Innovation Lead, Airbnb
Airbnb’s efforts to connect tourists and adventurers with unforgettable housing accommodations and experiences is just one of the innumerable reasons why the market is largely anticipating the company to go public next year with an IPO. The home-sharing startup recognized over $1 billion in revenue in the third quarter, according to a memo released on Friday. The fact that Airbnb is still a privately-traded company has many in the space in a state of confusion, including the company’s own former CFO Laurence Tosi who quit in February because Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s CEO, wasn’t ready to go public. Although Tosi instead that the company go public sooner, Chesky insisted that Airbnb should operate on their own “time horizon.”
Though Chesky may have his trepidations about taking Airbnb public, the market is well aware of the company’s impressive revenue. Last year, Airbnb reported $100 million in profit on $2.6 billion in revenue, numbers that suggest that an IPO could be in the best interest of the company.
One analyst, tech investor Bill Gurley told Skift that he believes Airbnb, specifically its CEO, is wasting time as a private company:
“All these entrepreneurs love to tell you how wonderful it is to be private…Chesky’s getting hurt right bow because he’s private…And [Booking Holds CEO Glenn] Fogel has the microphone because he’s in the public and you’re sitting over there private not sharing anything…taking the brunt of these blows.”
–Bill Gurley
As Airbnb continues to grow its home-sharing platform and its global host community, it may be only a matter of time before an IPO starts sounding like a better idea for Brian Chesky. In the meantime, if you need me, I’ll be playing with reindeer and sleeping in a teepee with the Dukha tribe, somewhere in the mountains of northern Mongolia.
