In February of this year, Airbnb acquired the social payment startup Tilt. Today, the fruits of this acquisition are passed on to Airbnb users.
Right now, Airbnb users have the ability to share payments with their fellow travelers. Before that, a traveler was forced to pay for the trip and hoped that his friends / colleagues / family were responsible enough to pay them back quickly.
Payment splitting will be possible with 16 travelers, which will provide a lot of flexibility for large groups traveling together.
Airbnb indicates that 30% of bookings made with the payment splitting tool (which has been tested) have led to one or more new users on Airbnb. So while this is a useful feature for users, it's also a growth tool for Airbnb.
On Christmas Day 2016, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky asked users what features they most wanted on Airbnb. According to the company, the splitting of payments was one of the major requests in response to the tweet.
As part of this announcement, Airbnb conducted a survey with the help of Pollfish and DKC Analytics for 2,000 adults in the United States between November 15 and November 18. Of this sample, 43% lost $ 1,000 or more in group travel. In addition, 18% claim that they lost $ 10,000 or more because they were not reimbursed after group travel, and 29% fought with a friend for reimbursement from a group trip.
Here's how it works:
When a travel organizer submits a reservation request, the portion of the organizer's payment is debited on his credit card, which opens a menu to share the reservation with the other members of the group of travel. They then have 72 hours to connect to Airbnb and pay their share.
In the blog, Airbnb mentions that this workflow applies to "ads eligible for split payments", but did not specify what it means nor the percentage of Airbnb ads eligible. We have reached out and will update the message when we hear.
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