How else can help its users Airbnb and other travel services

Sharing economy is gaining momentum, and today renting an apartment or a room through Airbnb while on vacation is common. People are increasingly using services such as BlaBlaCar or Uber to get from one place to another. There are many other applications and services that allow people to save when sharing material goods, while not losing in quality, and sometimes even winning.

We at AVO are also trying to improve the lives of our users by offering an inexpensive and at the same time convenient solution for international roaming. However, some of our users have difficulty buying a local SIM card. Most often, this is a language barrier or ignorance of the local mobile market, which is why the purchase turns into a quest and it may take too much time and effort.
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We have several solutions for such a case, but no matter how hard we try, we cannot provide a better price than local telecom operators. And we decided to check whether the sharing economy can help us and our users with this.
The idea is simple: check how open are the owners of Airbnb to the provision of such additional services as the purchase of a local SIM-card for guests. Such a service can be beneficial not only to owners and guests, but also to Airbnb itself, if they create an appropriate payment mechanism for such a service.

We chose 5 cities (Paris, Barcelona, ​​London, Moscow, New York) - the most popular tourist destinations in our opinion and conducted an experiment.

The essence of the experiment is simple:
1) Choosing a city
2) Set the date of arrival after 2 months, the period of stay - 10 days
3) We set the price at 30% below the average (for both individual rooms and the whole apartment)
4) We write to all the first 10 owners on the list (and for individual rooms, and for the whole apartment) something like this is the message:
“Hi,
I'm planing to visit. Will be great if you can host me.
I'm crazy about music.
Will you be able to provide a local SIM with 1-2 Gb data plan? I'll pay extra for it. ”
and waiting for an answer.
5) We process the received answers and enter the results in the table.
If the owner writes that he will accept us with pleasure and provide a SIM card for him or him or specify which format of the SIM card we need (micro, nano), we rate this answer as “YES” (2 points).

If the answer is like this: “there is a shop nearby where you can easily buy; we will help you / show you ”or“ SIM-ku can be bought at the airport, it costs so much ”- we rate this answer as“ CAN BE ”(1 point).
If a clearly negative response is received, then this is “NO”. (-1 point)
There are still those who did not answer at all or said that the apartment / room is occupied for this period, then it is “NOT ANSWERED” (0 points).

Summing up all the data, we get a kind of index that allows to evaluate the responsiveness of the owners to buy a SIM-card, let's call it SIM-Index. For completeness, we also give the percentage of positive answers (“YES” and “CAN BE”). For each city, we calculated both the total SIM Index and the percentage of positive responses, and separately for those who rent only a room, and those who rent an apartment entirely.



As the table shows, Moscow and Barcelona were the most responsive in terms of providing a local SIM card. In third place - Paris. The lenders from London and New York were the least helpful.
At the same time, in New York we saw the largest gap of the SIM Index when booking the whole apartment and a separate room. The owners of the first gave the most bounces (despite the fact that half of them fell into the category “CAN BE”), while those who rented out separate rooms were much more conspiring. It is noteworthy that for Moscow everything is the opposite, and those who rent an apartment as a whole turned out to be the most responsive.

The goal of our experiment was to prove that for a fairly large part of those who rent out their rooms and apartments via Airbnb or other similar services (booking.com, theapartmentservice.com, athomeabroadinc.com, greatrentals.com, rentalo.com) provide a local SIM Cards for guests is not a problem, especially if they can earn extra dollars on it.

What's next? Further - to prove that such a service would also be interesting for the guests. According to Vodafone , 26% of business travelers prefer to buy local SIM cards, and we are confident that this percentage is not lower among Airbnb users.

What is the benefit of Airbnb ? First of all, this is the creation of additional value for its users and the ability to increase the average bill. We see 2 ways to implement this service:
The hosts indicate that they could provide a local SIM-card for the guest, and indicate the price. Guest when booking an apartment puts or does not put a tick in front of this service. At the same time, the cost of the SIM card will be included in the paid cost, and Airbnb will be able to deduct its commission.
Airbnb enters into a partnership agreement with a SIM card provider that will deliver the cards both to the home address before the trip and to the address of the apartment upon arrival. In this case, the Airbnb commission can be much higher, as they will work directly with the supplier. It is very important to choose the right provider and avoid tourist SIM-cards, preferring those companies that can provide exactly local SIM-cards with the appropriate tariffs. By the way, AVO provides SIM cards for the whole of Europe , next in line are the USA, Canada and Asia.

In addition, as an addition, you can use affiliate programs with services for travelers who need an Internet connection to work with. It can be both excursion services, maps, recommendations of institutions, as well as such applications as AVO, which allow you to use your mobile number abroad without roaming charges.

We hope that in the near future, hotel booking and ticket sales services will pay attention to the problems of mobile communication of their users, and in addition to insurance, transfers and car booking services will also offer solutions for low-cost mobile communication during trips.