Airbnb revealed a new “healthy tourism” initiative Tuesday intended to make sure communities around the world — including in the Bay Area — benefit from the flood of tourists the company brings to their doors.
The San Francisco-based startup’s new Office of Healthy Tourism aims to drive visitors to overlooked, economically struggling places where tourism dollars are desperately needed, such as farm towns in France or villages in rural Japan. Cities closer to Airbnb’s hometown stand to benefit, too, and the company already has penned a partnership with Sacramento as part of the initiative.
The move, in which Airbnb is trying to position itself as a company that helps — not hurts — local communities, comes as the world is becoming disillusioned with tech companies such as Facebook and Uber over the way they handle user data, treat employees, and more.
“Our aspiration is ultimately to be working as closely as possible with governments as an ally in helping to promote the right kind of tourism,” Chris Lehane, Airbnb’s head of global policy, said Tuesday during a conference call with reporters.
To do that, Lehane said, Airbnb will ask several questions of the lodging and activities it promotes: “Is it local? Is it authentic? Is it diverse? Is it inclusive? And is it sustainable?” The effort will be led by a Tourism Advisory Board, made up of four members with backgrounds in tourism, foreign affairs and conservation — former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr, former deputy CEO of tourism and conservation for the Rwanda Development Board Rosette Rugamba; former head of the World Travel & Tourism Council David Scowsill and former Secretary-General of the United Nations’ World Tourism Organization Taleb Rifai.
As a start, Airbnb will share its data on traveler demographics and trip details with local governments to help them better plan their tourism strategies. On Tuesday the company released data on 300 cities and 80 countries, Lehane said. Airbnb says the data generally will be aggregated and anonymized, protecting the privacy of people who use the platform.
Airbnb also will work with NGOs to promote visits to communities that typically miss out on tourism dollars, and already has a partnership with the World Bank. In September, Airbnb will host a conference dubbed the Africa Travel Summit to discuss accelerating tourism in under-served communities in the country.
But the initiative isn’t focused only on foreign travel — the Office of Healthy Tourism has been helping the Sacramento Kings and Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg in a bid to host an NBA All-Star game in 2022 or 2023 in the city’s new downtown arena, the Golden 1 Center. It was Airbnb’s job to come up with lodging for the flood of fans that would pour into the city for the game.
“They came to us to make the bid because under the bid formulas that the NBA had, they didn’t necessarily have enough ‘hotel rooms’ to be able to make a bid,” Lehane said.
Airbnb offered up 2,000 hosts by 2023, according to a letter Lehane sent NBA commissioner Adam Silver in January.
The company crafted a similar deal with the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ahead of the 2016 Olympic Games, offering about 20,000 listings in the city.
Lehane said Bay Area residents can expect more to come from the new Office of Healthy Tourism.
“I think there’s going to be other types of events like that,” he said, “that we will be working on in the Bay Area.”
