Airbnb Has Built a Hotel
Homeowners turned entrepreneurs have been renting our their spaces for tidy little profits, and hotels have advertised on Airbnb, but Airbnb has taken the next step into shaking up the hotel industry by building…a hotel.
Set in the quiet town of Yoshino in Japan, the Yoshino Cedar House will soon be available on Airbnb for guests to book. As the first project of Samara, Airbnb’s new design studio, their project had a twist.
According to their site, the property is being built with the intention of helping/working with the community of the diminished rural village.
Rather than depending on imported urban supplies, the structure is carefully built of cedar from the nearby forests that has been milled locally, fish from the river are provided for meals, and the proceeds from each booking goes to Yoshino community.
There are some who quickly pointed out that Airbnb hasn’t yet used the word hotel, but agree that it is indeed what they built. Airbnb is a business and businesses tend to want to make a profit.
Fastcodesign.com got an exclusive look at the project, and pointed out the following –
After this project, Airbnb will look to scale it to other declining small towns across the world. The idea is that Airbnb could become a force not only in sharing homes, but in urban planning.
That kind of sounds like a hotel chain to me. It’ll be interesting to see if they are able to invest the same amount of time and community involvement into each subsequent property, and how this will evolve.
