You hear their various accents, notice the sun’s different position in their time zones, and get a sense of their interior decoration tastes. The classes are generally small enough that you can chat, discuss and joke with both your instructor and your fellow classmates. They are live and two-way, and you are with people. I discovered the answer to that second question immediately. I crammed in seven Airbnb courses, all in hopes of answering the question: How well can a Zoom video chat replicate experiencing another place or culture? And how is it any better than, say, watching a YouTube video on the topic? A weekend of experiences (Visiting Alaska? Go salmon fishing! Visiting Italy? Do a wine tasting!) When the company suspended those risky in-person interactions in March, the guides, suddenly unemployed, proposed adapting their classes to video.Īnd so, last weekend, while the rest of the country was binge-watching, I went binge-experiencing. Many of the guides once led these sessions in person, as part of Airbnb’s Experiences program. (“We had one called, ‘My Experiences Watching My Cat,’” she says. Catherine Powell, who leads the Airbnb Experiences program, says that her team has received thousands of proposals. At the moment, some 200 classes are available, but the company adds another dozen or so every week, after vetting and viewing a dress rehearsal of each. The average price per person is about $10, but you might pay as little as $2 (“ Cultural Journey through London Chinatown”) or as much as $73 (“ Private Astrology Reading & Natal Chart,” from Barcelona). Over the course of an hour or two, the hosts dive into a wide range of artistic, cultural, musical, culinary and athletic topics: “ Dance Like a K-pop Star,” presented live by a guide in South Korea “ Cooking with a Moroccan Family,” from Marrakesh “ Tokyo Anime and Subcultures,” from Japan “ Day in the Life of a Shark Scientist,” from South Africa. Airbnb recently introduced what it calls Online Experiences: Live interactive sessions, conducted over Zoom by guides around the world, for small groups of “tourists” stuck at home. Surely there’s nothing left to be Zoomified.Īctually, there is. Meetings, parties, concerts, music lessons, exercise classes: Any interactions that can be adapted to a Zoom video call, have been. In the Great Lockdown, two-way video has become our primary social channel.
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