How Airbnb Profits From Our Love of Experience
Danielle Oteri has been giving food tours of the Bronx's Arthur Avenue for more than a decade, but her family's connection to the famous Italian-American enclave in New York City go back even further: all the way to 1918.
When Airbnb opened up its Experiences tours and activities business to New York City in 2017, nearly 100 years later, Oteri was one of the first hosts to sign on. But now, two years in, Oteri, a seasoned food tour guide, is noticing some copycat tours on the platform. One of them, she suspects, was started by someone just trying to get some money on the side. Another? A major conglomerate that sells its tours on every platform imaginable. She's even seen some of those bigger players tweak their Airbnb host profiles to make it seem as if their tours are offered by just one person, like a local food blogger, instead of some big corporate entity.
Oteri's friend and fellow food tour guide, Joe DiStefano, a Queens, New York-based food writer, says he's even heard of people going on a food tour, asking the guide for the specific prices of each item eaten, and then hosting the same exact tour on Airbnb — for half the price. "When you're on a platform [like Airbnb], even if you're successful, it's very competitive, because you never know who's going to come in and sell an experience like yours," says Oteri. "Anyone who does an experience on there is vulnerable to having someone do the exact same experience."
