The changing number of guests meant that I was constantly adjusting my route and pacing to cater for different walking speeds. My group size would average 2-3 people, but also there was often one person in the tour. I didn’t know how many customers I was expecting, but it’s fair to say that there were much less than I had anticipated. Airbnb takes a 20% cut and I had to also pay income tax on the remainder. I set my price point at $25, which I thought was about right for what I would pay for a two-hour walking tour.
The final step was to take photos of me pretending to be a tour guide and write a profile on Airbnb. I designed my own route that contained a good mix of architectural marvels and laneway secrets. I decided that this was too long and wanted to keep my tour to 2 hours maximum. Most of the walking tours were 3 hours long, with a 20 break in the middle. I studiously took notes in my phone about the stories being told and relied on Google maps to record the routes we were taking.
So, what did I do? I went on Melbourne walking tours operated by 4 different companies. This had given me a general idea how they work and a few pointers on what to do and what not to do While I had a good knowledge of the key points in Melbourne’s history and knew most of the main sights, I didn’t know where to start in curating a tour.
In my mid-twenties I’d travelled around most of Europe and had been on dozens and dozens of walking tours. My first step was to learn how to give a walking tour. I could speak a decent amount of Spanish and Portuguese, so I figured a local Melburnian giving tours in those languages might be a key point of differentiation. With my love of Melbourne, interest in history and hours spent walking around the Melbourne CBD, a walking tour appeared to be the logical choice. I thought this Experience thing sounded like a great idea and immediately started thinking about what experiences I could create. My friend had started an Italian cooking class, inviting people into his apartment to teach them how to make authentic gnocchi from scratch. Examples of Experiences are walking tours, cooking classes, guided hikes, pub crawls and craft lessons. In an Experience, the host doesn’t rent out their property to guests, but rather they sell their time to provide a local’s perspective to tourists. I was catching up with a friend one day and he told me about how he had started doing this thing called ‘Airbnb Experiences’. This is a story about my experience creating my own tour and working with the Airbnb platform. I used Airbnb ‘Experiences’ to source the ‘guests’, advertise the tour, handle the transactions, and communicate with my guests. For two years I gave walking tours through the majestic streets of Melbourne.
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