On the second day of the new year, Brian Chesky (Airbnb co-founder) polled his Twitter audience in a quest to know the improvements and additions they would like from the home rental platform for this year.

Over 4.5K Responses To Chesky’s Poll

4.5K responses later, Chesky revealed that his followers’ most requested feature was for Airbnb to start supporting crypto payments. The second and third most requested features were transparent pricing and guest loyalty programs. The CEO further disclosed that the company has already planned to incorporate some of these features this year. 

Got 4,000 suggestions. Here are the top 6:

1 – Crypto payments (top suggestion)
2 – Clear pricing displays
3 – Guest loyalty program
4 – Updated cleaning fees
5 – More long-term stays & discounts
6 – Better customer service

Already working on most, will look into others now! https://t.co/rxEM4BXZci

— Brian Chesky (@bchesky) January 5, 2022

However, he disclosed that his followers would need to suggest various tokens before considering implementing crypto payment support. The Airbnb boss further revealed that the company had processed payments worth nearly $340m over the last nine years of its existence.

A Careful Approach To Feature Implementation

Chesky poll only serves as a reminder for Airbnb in adding a crypto payment feature. Four months ago, Chesky confirmed in a Fox Business interview that their users have been requesting crypto support features for many years.

During that interview, Chesky remarked that the current Coinbase CEO was one of the previous employees before he founded Coinbase. He further added that “we are happy with what Brian and his team have achieved with Coinbase over the years.”

In another interview with the verge a month later, Chesky revealed that they are considering crypto. It represents an exciting revolution in the financial world the same way Airbnb has revolutionized the travel industry.

Airbnb’s IPO prospectus close to the time it became a publicly-traded company showed that it’s keeping in mind developments relating to digital currencies and blockchain technology.

Part of the prospectus reads, “our ability to adjust to current technological trends will be crucial to our long-term success. Right now, such technological trends include authentication and blockchain technologies. These technologies encompass tokenization, digital assets, biometrics, artificial intelligence, and cloud technologies, among others.”

Joining Other Top Firms 

If Airbnb should start supporting crypto payments, it will add to the number of top firms incorporating crypto payments for their services. However, the prospectus stated that the company might not implement these technologies based on costs and possible failures. Thus, resulting in various adverse effects such as consumer issues, business loss, and a negative perception of the brand.

Payment solution firms (square (now known as block) and PayPal) and movie theater behemoth, AMC, are among the top companies supporting crypto payments on their platforms for the various services they offer. Before AMC started supporting crypto payments, its CEO also initiated the process through a poll for its Twitter audience.

Twitter is gradually becoming the go-to place for CEOs of top companies to know whether it is ripe for them to start supporting crypto payments. Nevertheless, it would be in the company’s best interests to heed calls from its users as its major competitors, notably Travala and DTravel, have already incorporated crypto payment support on their platforms.