Stays on Airbnb require less electricity, less water and produce less trash and greenhouse emissions than hotel stays. In fact, Airbnb's very business model is sustainable at its heart. We don't build anything. We don't ship anything. Essentially, we help our hosts 'upcycle idle space' and share it, and their lives, with their guests.
We know many guests choose Airbnb for environmental reasons so we wanted to drive a deeper connection with our community by speaking to our shared sustainability values, and spark interest among potential new consumers who want more exposure to sustainable living practices so they can deploy them in their lives when they return back home.
Our eco friendly hosts teach their guests about the beauty we receive from nature, but also our obligations towards protecting it. And we hope this means their guests take some of this knowledge home with them, and in turn, share that on.
This was our first step of instigating our journey as a credible voice in the area of sustainable travel, so our goals were to drive awareness. We chose the goal of social sharing as advocacy is a great starting point for a discussion around eco travel.
We set a goal of average number of shares and likes per post, based on our company benchmarks per market. This was then backed up with qualitative sentiment measurement around comments, to ensure conversation was positively skewed towards consideration of Airbnb for eco reasons.
Eco holidays often conjure up images of glamping or yoga-in-nature. Aware of this cliche, and with a backdrop of travel marketing rich in highly saturated images and picture perfect views, we wanted our content to break the mould. To do so, we knew we had to tell real stories - of real hosts, their real lives, and the prospect of holidays that are enriching and attainable for guests, and result in sustained and pragmatic familiarity with eco-practices, thanks to our hosts.
We chose video as we knew the stories were longer than an image could do justice for, and we wanted to capture the feeling of really living in the hosts' worlds. The videos needed to be raw yet aspirational; homely yet inspiring wanderlust; truthful yet optimistic; grounded yet inspirational, local, while demonstrating that the drive and ability to care for our earth is universal, spanning countries, cultures and languages.
It was a tall order on a small production budget and managed by an even smaller in-house team, but the resulting films were real, humble and moving.
We managed to find a wealth of potential hosts to feature, but landed on making 3 videos of hosts Marc, Thomas, Jorg and Helena who exemplify sustainability values everyday. Each host exposes their guests to a different lifestyle — of solar-powered homes, sustainable olive groves and biodiversity farms.
We partnered closely with our CSR and Public Policy teams who were simultaneously launching an environmental impact study, and we launched on World Earth Day, the most talked about eco cultural moment of the year, to drive relevance and therefore resonance and reach.
The videos ran on Facebook for 1 short but highly topical day in UK, France, Germany, US, China, Italy, Netherlands, Russia, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan. In that short time, they managed to clock over 1M views, 30,000 likes and 2,500 shares.
The business objective of social shares surpassed our goal by over 300%. On top of this, our cost efficiency on share rate was 4x benchmark (which is already quite a bit lower than industry benchmark).
The impact on social can be seen through hundreds of happy comments on the video, such as:
"So beautiful, thanks for sharing. If everyone in the world could do the same it would be a much better place to live" - Patricia Louvet
"Thank you for what you're doing, the world needs more people and companies like you" - Maria Faria
"Thank you for telling this story, it's so necessary" - Malika Haddaoui
And it started a conversation among our hosts, too, some of whom shared what they do to help safeguard the environment:
"I garden without chemicals..." - Alexandrine Ducret
"Our home has the maximum levels of recycling!!!..." - Danielle Brossard