Part B B. PROJECT SECTION I

Part B B. PROJECT SECTION I Research the business problem and describe your understanding of it. Perform a thorough research investigation of how it works, impact on business (or society), and metrics or financial indicators (how you will benchmark the effectiveness of your solution) and any other research you can find. Be sure to give a thorough background of the problem and cite to appropriate articles and papers to prove the validity of your research. Also include existing solutions in the market that address this problem. How impactful is the problem? Whom does this affect, how and to what extent How is it currently addressed? Why these methods are inefficient or ineffective An “as-ls” process maps illustrating the current process/solution with some explanations

Airbnb is not a publicly traded company so it was difficult locating exact dollar amounts of losses. However, in a pre-covid article on the company’s profitability Vox quoted the Wall Street Journal stating that “In the first nine months of 2019, the home-sharing company posted a loss of $322 million… In the same period a year earlier it had a profit of $200 million.” According to the same article Airbnb planned to spend about $150 million on safety initiatives including verification of the properties it lists. (Molla)

By having a few trusted and vetted agents in each area inspect and verify the properties and hosts, Airbnb would be able to use fewer resources and move away from the self-reporting which was so unreliable in the past. In this way our proposal looks to cut costs and losses in the form of lawyers’ fees (Carville) and lost busines (valuation dropped from 38 to 35 billion dollars in the wake of news about various lawsuits. (Carville, Locke)