Designing a 10-Star Guest Experience by Airbnb's Brian Chesky

We created this exercise. We thought, you know when you go on Airbnb, this is also true Uber, like a five star mostly means nothing bad happened. And we thought, well what if there was a six star? What would that be when you check into your Airbnb? And the six star is you get to your Airbnb and there's a bottle of wine waiting on the table and there's some fruit and they have a handwritten note to you. And we're like, okay, that's really nice. And then I thought, well what would a seven star experience be? A seven star experience is they get a limo, they pick you up at the airport and there's this like whole curated experience. You get to the house and they know you like surfing and there's a surfboard there waiting for you and all that stuff. So then I thought, what would an eight star experience be like? An eight star experience, you get to the airport, there's a giant elephant and you get on the elephant and there's a parade in your honor and you go to your Airbnb. So what would a nine star experience be? The nine star experience is the Beatles check-in. You land and there's 5,000 teenagers cheering your name and you get to your Airbnb and you have to do a press conference in the front lawn. So what's a 10 star experience? We'll keep going. A 10 star experience, you show up and Elon Musk says, we're going to space. And you do get back eventually. And the point of this story is that you maybe can't make an eight, nine or 10 star experience, but most people try to design something that's just good enough. But if you can add that six or seven star, if you can design something really amazing and you use the part of your brain, the handcrafted part of your brain to create that perfect experience, then you can reverse engineer how to industrialize this millions of times over and what happens is people love your product and they tell everyone else about your product. And what ended up happening in our business is Hilton was started in 1919, over 100 years ago, and we were able to have the entire growth of Hilton in 10 years. And this is how you do it without, we had some marketing, but initially not a lot.