Ari Balogh, Airbnb
Brand-new to Airbnb as of last month, Ari Balogh is charged with leading infrastructure, information IT and security and engineering for payments, trust and community support as CTO.
Balogh comes to Airbnb from Google, where he was responsible for the data systems behind Google Search. He also served as CTO at Yahoo.
Brian Chesky and Airbnb speak often of the end to end travel experience - from a technological perspective, what does that mean to you?
The Airbnb vision of end-to-end travel encompasses where you stay, what you do and who you meet. The technology behind it involves deeper, more immersive and personalized exploration and search, from drawing inspiration for where and how to spend your time, all the way to the smallest details of developing an itinerary.
We want to deliver an inspirational and delightful online experience, backed by spot-on customer support for those rare hiccups, all driven by artificial intelligence.
Airbnb has now positioned itself against online travel agencies including Booking.com and Expedia. What in Airbnb's technical arsenal gives it a leg up over these travel giants? And where does it fall short?
I’ve only been at Airbnb for a few months, but one of the things I’ve observed is an obsession with creating community and connecting people with and within communities.
Airbnb has this exquisite focus on design, on interaction and the human touch, which is what I believe truly makes travel special. It’s a cultural element in everything, and it feels like a core differentiator.
Name the top three things from your past experience at Google and Yahoo that have prepared you for Airbnb.
Every company has its own unique culture, opportunities and challenges, and it’s important to be open to new approaches and not force fit past patterns and methods to new situations. That said, certain things come up frequently.
To my knowledge, Google doesn’t intentionally compete with the travel industry.
Ari Balogh
First, growing people and teams and maintaining a listening culture of trust and teamwork is crucial to scaling effectively. A second area is bringing together all the disciplines to build delightful consumer experiences - and here Airbnb is even more focused and capable than anywhere else I’ve worked - and doing so at speed.
A final area is likely developing infrastructure for great search and artificial intelligence that together deliver compelling experiences for a wonderfully diverse community
It's widely argued that Google is a threat to the travel industry; having come from the Google side, what's your response?
In my opinion, Google enables online experiences that can be monetized through advertising, that directly support enterprises through their Cloud platform, or that are showcased on their own hardware.
Like almost every industry, travel is being transformed by technology, some of which Google is making available via open source or selling through their Cloud. But to my knowledge, Google doesn’t intentionally compete with the travel industry.
What is the single biggest hurdle technologically speaking that Airbnb needs to cross to get to its IPO?
I’ve not seen any specific hurdles, so much as the constant focus on improving the basics of the customer experience and all the infrastructure and data that support it. The larger issue that both the tech and travel industries need to work through is how to use technology to enable people economically, rather than exploit or displace them.
What are the biggest challenges around search you hope to address at Airbnb?
Frankly, it needs to work a lot better, with more personalization and context across sessions, more seamless exploration, better relevance and integrating a lot more content useful in planning compelling itineraries, for both local and global travel and experiences.
How (or is) Airbnb preparing its tech stack for more hotel integration? And (potentially) flights?
Technology powers every part of the Airbnb experience, from online interactions on our platform to offline connections in homes, in boutique hotels, on trips and with different communities across the globe. We are constantly developing and improving tools that address the unique needs of our multi-sided marketplace.
A focus on infrastructure is a big part of this; we need to support our continued growth and diversity of guests, hosts of all kinds and partners, and tackle unique challenges that come with scaling operations like payments, taxes, fraud detection and such, for 191+ different countries.
What emerging technologies do you think will have the biggest impact on your business in the next decade?
The easy one that everyone is already talking about is artificial intelligence, which Airbnb already uses to improve the guest and host experiences - for everything from improving search, to preventing fraud, helping hosts optimize pricing and much more. Every reservation made on Airbnb interacts with AI technology in some way.
Subscribe to our newsletter below
More interesting is how augmented reality will enhance most aspects of travel with contextually relevant elements and personal assistance. Similarly, virtual reality will enable much more immersive exploration of compelling experiences, as well as factor in some of them. When combined with emerging higher bandwidth networks and phones that are optimized for sophisticated on-device AI models and graphics, the possibilities are endless.
Is the best relationship to have one being solid with your team or with your boss?
Ultimately you need both, though the team has to come first. There are few results without your team, so the boss relationship won’t last long without it, anyway.
How is the tech community making strides on diversity and inclusion, and what other roadblocks does it still face?
Mostly as a result of some courageous people who have been willing to suffer the personal consequences of speaking out, the tech community is actively talking about the issues, has started to measure and set goals and has begun focusing on hiring ratios. This is progress, but not nearly enough.
As an industry (and a society), we need to get to a place where the actual day-to-day experiences at work are such that not being part of the majority is never the cause for feeling under-appreciated, ignored or left behind, let alone actively held back or harassed.
That burden of wondering every morning if it’s going to be yet another one of “those” days has to become a thing of the past. This won’t happen with a checkbox mentality of an annual training class or two about unconscious bias. Real cultural transformation happens when daily/weekly activities - with many reinforcing elements that continue to measure and innovate on practices - create safety and opportunity at every level of an organization. It needs to be approached with the same fervor and financial commitment as any other strategic business initiative.
Having a diverse and safe environment is not just about good citizenship, it’s also great business that yields the best products and services. And at Airbnb, our mission is to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere - and that includes at work.
How can technology be a force for good on issues such as climate change and overtourism?
Technology democratizes knowledge and experience, in a very broad and also a personal sense, from scientific studies to personal experiences and (sometimes less than civil) discourse. It allows people to connect online as well as in the real world.
At a time when travel is 10% of the global economy and growing, Airbnb enables “healthy travel” that is local, authentic, diverse, inclusive and sustainable, versus mass (unhealthy) travel that bottles up the economics of travel, takes money out of communities and is environmentally unsustainable.
Frankly, search needs to work a lot better.
Ari Balogh
We bring guests beyond the monuments and hotel districts to connect with locals and neighborhoods, enabling deep experiences that touch lives and make travel more meaningful and educational.
Describe how you would persuade your boss to try a new, untested piece of technology in the business.
You never deploy an untested piece of technology with unknown cost/benefit into a business; it will almost certainly fail, even if only for missing expectations.
There’s prototyping, early adopter testing and developing a rough sense of the perceived benefit versus the cost. It’s a matter of getting a progressively better sense of the potential of the technology for customer delight or operational efficiency, the needed depth of which is driven by the risk appetite of that part of the business. Then it’s an easy conversation.
Will there ever really be a seamless traveler experience?
These already exist, it’s just they’re either completely programmed, with little traveler flexibility and too much “standard travel fare,” or are too pricey.
The real question is: Will it be possible to go from inspiration and intent to detailed itinerary that suits all the personal needs and preferences of the traveler, and do so creatively for any budget?
And the answer is: Absolutely, but it will take a while for all the real-world options to be available online and pieced together with easy-to-use tools that capture the quality of the experience elements and manage the cost. And that’s what Airbnb is working on.