Airbnb uses location technology to hook you up with nomadic hosts – Mongolian reindeer herders
- Airbnb hosts in remote locations are shunning addresses in favour of a global address system that divides the planet into trillions of 3x3-metre squares
- Mongolia is the first country to be used in the venture
Finding your Airbnb host is easy. You touch the “get directions” button in the Airbnb app, and it opens Google or Apple Maps on your phone. But what if your Airbnb host has moved or is in a remote area? The sharing-economy travel app now uses location technology so guests can find their bed even if the host has no fixed address.
The idea is to increase tourism in remote, nomadic communities with hosts that move from season to season. Global address system what3words and Airbnb have joined up to help families without a fixed address share their homes with travellers looking for truly authentic, off the beaten track experiences.
The what3words app uses a grid of the world made up of 57 trillion squares of 3x3 metres that differs from most other location encoding systems, in that it displays three words rather than long strings of numbers or letters.
Each square is given this three-word English address that enables bidirectional conversion into exact latitude/longitude coordinates.
For example, ///eradicate.amaze.arriving will take you to the precise entrance of the South China Morning Post office in Hong Kong. It shares specific locations on the planet, and as well as being far more accurate than a written address or postcode, it lends itself to being used in vast open spaces.
