Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb posted a poll on Twitter asking his roughly 400,000 followers what they wanted from the rental platform in 2022. Out of 4,000 suggestions, the poll revealed that most respondents want to pay with Bitcoin (BTC) or other popular cryptos when renting their house or apartment through Airbnb.
Airbnb currently accepts payments via MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, Google Pay and Apple Pay. The popular rental platform has now processed over $336 billion worth of transactions since 2013. After seeing the poll results, Chesky is now dabbling with the idea of adding Bitcoin and several digital tokens to Airbnb’s potential crypto payment selection.
The Airbnb CEO revealed that he has been receiving a lot of inquiries about crypto payments. In September, he told Fox Business he has been getting that request for years but he has nothing to announce for that time. But during his interview with The Verge back in November, he said that the company is now looking into it.
Chesky added that Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, was a former employee of Airbnb and was in charge of the company’s fraud detection system as well as its payment platform. Coinbase is now one of the biggest and most trusted online crypto exchange platforms where users can buy, sell, trade and store cryptos.
In addition, the crypto enthusiasm around Airbnb further arises when the rental platform began to have tighter competitions with other decentralised and blockchain-based companies that offer the same service such as Travala and Staybit.
While the request for crypto payment option tops the Airbnb CEO’s Twitter poll, other essential requests also gained a lot of votes. These include a loyalty program, updated cleaning fees, clear pricing displays, long-term stay options, discounts and better customer service.
After posting the results of the Twitter poll, Chesky says that Airbnb is ‘already working on some’ and ‘will look into others now’. However, comments requesting a timeline for the crypto payment adoption was not entertained by the CEO.
Since its launch in 2007, Airbnb has become the largest rental platform in the world. It has served more than 1 billion customers and has over 4 million hosts that have listed their rental houses or apartments on the platform. Once Airbnb officially includes crypto in its payment options, it will join Tesla, AMC and other popular firms in accepting digital assets as payment.
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