I am devouring a slice on pizza on Broadway in downtown LA and talking to Matthew, a gaunt-looking fellow whose protruding ears make him resemble a coyote from his native Arizona.
"Seven minutes - that's the average time each tourist experiences the Grand Canyon for," Matt informs me in a cowboy drawl. Californians and Chinese visitors jostle for freebies at the stall next to us.
"I'm going right home and putting my price up to 200 dollars. Flat rate. Whether they stay in the yurt, or I take 'em out the whole day."
We're at the AirBnB Open: part conference, part festival, part staging for press announcements by the world's largest hospitality group - with 3 million rooms worldwide by now.
Earlier that day CEO Brian Chesky took a break from interviewing Gwyneth Paltrow to say hi to his mum in the front row of the 3,000 capacity theater. The young Chesky had studied art, moved to San Francisco, and started renting three airbeds (breakfast included) on his floor. "I'm an entrepreneur, mom!", he told her - she shot back "You're not an entrepreneur, you're unemployed" to her son whose company is now worth $3 billion.
Full disclosure: I'm a big AirBnB fan, and now a host in Washington DC, where Hotel Jones is starting to take the District's rental market by storm.
So for anyone tempted by next year's Open, definitely go. For one thing, bringing together 3,000 people with a shared interest is always going to be fun. Especially if they're AirBnB hosts: a self-selecting group based on (a) openness; (b) an entrepreneurial streak; and (c) willingness to clean a lot of bathrooms.
AirBnB hired out four vintage movie theaters from LA's golden age of cinema - huge baroquely decorated places with carved mahogany bannisters and glittering damask and gold ornaments. As usual, I have no idea who the celebrities were. (Ashton Kutcher, anyone?) But I enjoyed meeting Jitsak, a Thai gentleman dressed in purple and white pinstripes who hosts at three places in Phuket; Winnie, an original hippie from Vancouver Island who played her flute in all the venues; and Jorge from Costa Rica, who has built up 5+ successful places and has the glint in his eye of a local-entrepreneur-who's-making-it.
Watching AirBnB evolve is fascinating. People are often unsure if the company is good or bad. I picture two AirBnBs dueling in space: a Darth Vader AirBnB, empowering cynical capitalists to tear up communities, and a Luke Skywalker version, helping travelers open their horizons and poor families pay the bills. Protesters circled the venue protesting the Darth Vader version. So which had the upper hand at Open LA?
Well, I got some snapshots of the kind of market we're increasingly seeing. A straggly-bearded guy from Seattle has twelve units and is aiming for 24. He slips the building owners a couple of hundred each month as peace money (neighboring apartment dwellers would be furious). Brainy start-up guys touted for business with their software for hosts who are clearly handling large businesses: a raw capitalist drive that could mess up some irreplaceable places (think Venice, New Orleans) if left untrammeled.
But then you look at how cities have responded. London enforces a 90-day rental limit per year. Cities like DC are getting a huge helping hand with tax collection because AirBnB collects a 12.5% tax and remits it straight to them. (Forget the hassle of chasing up taxpayers through letters and collections departments.) Some cities are undecided: New York has made a pigs ear of regulating AirBnB so far, announcing a blanket ban enforced with $7,500 fines for advertising a short-term rental, but this has been stayed by court order, so the status quo continues. AirBnB staff think that NYC put its bargaining chips down too early, lost credibility, and will probably end up with a middle-ground solution. The company knows how to play hardball - and when a workable solution comes around, they can also bring some powerful actions to the table, like collecting millions of dollars in tax, de-listing hundreds of people with multiple properties, and giving names and addresses to city enforcers.
Most people I met are the good type of host: retirees with a second home or spare room; ordinary people hosting alongside their day job; or people in seaside or ski resorts building a livelihood. AirBnB has also been taking on racial prejudice in a powerful way, squeezing out opportunities for (conscious or unconscious) bias from this vast and growing ecosystem.
This year's big announcement was on 'trips' - my Arizonian friend can now take people trekking, teach them how to tap a cactus for water, and do strange pseudo-Native American sweat lodge rituals with them. Everyone's a winner. It does underscore the extent to which, as one speaker put it, "hotels suck."
Matthew and I are in agreement about the one big mistake of Open LA: they hired Maroon 5, literally the worst band in the history of humanity. We escape to the host lounge (a Las Vegas style tiki bar) to drink a concoction called Painkiller while a Frank Sinatra impersonator sings Guns and Roses songs.
I've hosted 26 AirBnBs, but realize I've only stayed in two. It might be fun to stay in some more.
Downtown LA as seen from the Getty Center