Budget travelers want affordable, local, authentic places to stay. Hosts have empty rooms and air mattresses they could rent out. The two sides cannot find each other.
Average nightly hotel rates in major US cities exceed $225. Budget travelers are priced out of the cities they most want to visit.
Every chain hotel feels the same. Travelers want a sense of place. They get the same lobby, the same bed, the same room service menu.
17 million US households have a spare room. Most see it as wasted square footage, not an asset that could cover rent.
eBay and PayPal have trained millions of users to transact with strangers. Reviews and verified identity make a stranger's spare room feel safer than a motel.
Hosts need the extra few hundred dollars a month. Travelers need the savings. Both sides of the marketplace are pulled in at the same time.
Broadband and cheap digital cameras mean listings can show a real room, not a paragraph of adjectives. Craigslist's lodging section never made this jump.
Three steps. No back-and-forth email, no couch-surfing awkwardness, no hotel price.
Hosts post photos, a price (start at $10 per air mattress, up to whatever the market bears), availability, and house rules. Done in under 15 minutes.
Travelers filter by city, date, price, and amenities. One-click booking with a secure hold on payment until check-in.
After checkout, both sides rate the experience. Reviews compound into a trust layer that keeps the marketplace honest.
Why hosts list: idle capacity in an apartment, a few hundred dollars a month, the social side of meeting travelers. Why guests book: cheaper than a hotel, more local than a chain, more reliable than a Craigslist room.
Hosts bring listings. Travelers get selection. Travelers bring repeat bookings. Hosts earn more. More hosts sign up.
Every stay generates a review, a verified ID, a payment history. The trust graph is proprietary and takes years to rebuild.
The brand becomes a verb. Travelers come direct, not through search. That is the cheapest acquisition channel in travel.
Payments, taxes, insurance, support, and local lodging law in every launch city. Each new entrant pays the full cost to enter each city we already operate in.
List around sold-out events (SXSW, DNC). Demand is concrete, hosts mobilize fast.
Cross-post listings where allowed. Capture demand already searching for rooms.
Partner with travel writers for first-person stays. SXSW and DNC launches showed this works.
Hosts earn for inviting other hosts. Existing hosts know which friends have a spare room.
RISD, 2004. Led product design at 3Com after graduation. Built our first air-mattress prototype in his Rausch Street apartment.
Host-obsessed. Has personally stayed with our hosts in every launch city to date.
RISD, 2005. Co-founded CritBuns, a foam cushion sold by the RISD store and Target. Knows how to design, manufacture, and sell a physical product.
Drives the host side end-to-end, from listing flow to the free photography program.
We started AirBed and Breakfast in our Rausch Street apartment in late 2007 by hosting three designers on air mattresses during an Industrial Designers Society of America conference. We have been hosts, guests, and operators. We have not stopped iterating on the marketplace since.