Pros
The vast majority of my colleagues were amazing people, coming from all sorts of cultural and professional backgrounds. If there is one thing I am thankful for in the whole EU economical crisis debacle, it would be for giving me the opportunity to work with such a diverse group of people with vastly different backgrounds (students, architect, former advertising professional, film-makers, pastry chef, lawyer...) who all happened to work in customer support at that particular point in their life. Airbnb would organize meet-ups about once a year to enable colleagues to meet in person. This was particularly nice because most of us worked remotely, so we only knew each other via Gchat and meetings. It was always a very exciting time as together we came up with some great new ideas, and always enjoyed meeting our friends (some of my closest friends now are former Airbnb colleagues). The geographical flexibility is being removed, and centralized offices set up, so I don't know if the meet-ups will be a perk moving forward. On top of our monthly salary (EU), we received a quarterly $500 coupon to use on Airbnb reservations - great incentive for employees to use the product and see for themselves what traveler experience is like, and make suggestions based on real-life experience. I loved the concept of Airbnb from the moment I discovered it in 2011, and I still do. The idea of making the most of an empty space at a certain time, and thus enabling people to partially rent out a space they might not be able to afford otherwise is great. I also loved the idea of working for a company that didn't create waste as part of its business. Unfortunately, I found during visits to HQ in San Francisco that even though European offices were being incredibly careful about their expenditures, no such thing could be said about HQ.
Cons
I know I'm an idealist, but I am sad that no measures were taken to prevent property managers who run between 10 and 100 flats to use Airbnb in markets where real estate is already incredibly expensive. That was not the idea behind Airbnb, and this is what now hurts Airbnb's reputation (but brings in big bucks). I feel that as the company has grown, even though Customer Experience agents were always pushed for personal connection with the clients, the company's ethics shifted towards profit regardless of what the original values were. If that is not the case, statements such as "we were offered XX but refused because of our principles" would be great, so we feel like we are all in one boat, and working with a purpose other than just our investors' short-term profits. I loved the general values that were defined by the kind of people who were hired a few years ago. Sadly, the official "Core Values" presented to us later on felt patronizing, because they were giving us self-explanatory and unnecessary guidelines on how to treat customers and colleagues. When you hire good people who care about your product, customers, and team, you have to trust that they will act accordingly. Employees in general do not like being made to feel like you don't trust their basic judgement. I understand that I worked with Airbnb at a time when it was growing exponentially, and there are growing pains, however the European Customer Experience employees went through a really hard time given the type of job and pay they received when they were all asked to relocate to new countries (for some of them twice within the same year). A bit more foresight would have been a good thing, and would have made Airbnb as an employer look more credible. One other important point: even though most of my colleagues were a joy and pleasure to work with, and we made a good overall team, I will say that there were a few elements whose lack of care (as in, *did not care*, not careless mistakes) hurt our reputation for excellent customer service more times that I can count, and nothing tangible was done to help. A reporting of bad practices and re-training program was apparently in place, but never seemed to deliver results. I saw a few people fired extremely quickly, but never in the case of people who repeatedly (multiple times a week basis) hurt our work. This was very frustrating to everyone picking up the pieces and trying to calm down some rightfully angry customers. Let's aim for excellence all the way - also with contractors. The end of my time at Airbnb (9 months ago) was very disappointing. I do not believe I was treated with the respect and professionalism I had earned through my hard work and very strong dedication every day for almost two years, and was sad to notice that I was not alone. Living and working in Germany involves lots of red tape, and Airbnb was not up to standard in delivering paperwork in a timely manner, nor did they even have a HR representative responsible for Germany at a time when a significant number of the employees in Germany ended their contracts. I was disappointed by the lack of professionalism displayed by HR representatives, and by the lack of transparency on mid-management's role (from our perspective their names just popped up in emails and meetings when new random goals were being set, with no explanation). Whether due to frustration on their part because they weren't given the tools/time/support needed from management, or simply because they did not realize/care, I'm not sure, but it was not satisfactory from the employee side. It's one thing to say "we want to do everything we can to help", and it's another to actually go ahead and show that at a difficult time. Not baby-sitting, but empowering, responsible answers to questions.