Airbnb's Global Growth

Airbnb has released a fantastic infographic, Airbnb’s Global Growth, sharing their own stats about their phenominal growth from August 2008 to February 2012.

Airbnb started in Brian and Joe’s San Francisco apartment. Today, more than five million nights have been booked on Airbnb. And although Airbnb’s roots are in the USA, more than 75% of all reservations last year were international - where either the traveler or host (or both!) was outside the United States. Check out our infographic celebrating the international growth that you’ve powered.

I think an infographic is a great way for a company to share it’s story with it’s executives, it’s shareholders, the press and the public in general.  Infographics are visual storytelling, and every company has a story to tell.

The design is beautiful!  They’ve included a wide variety of data visualization types: area chart, doughnut chart, maps, bars and illustrations.  The one complaint I have is that too many of the stats are just shown in large text.  Large fonts don’t make good data visualizations.

They made an interesting choice and included the URL for a separate page on their website about the Airbnb service, instead of linking back to the original infographic.  I know they want to promote their service, but I think this is a mistake, because a reader has to search through their blog posts to find the infographic.  A couple things missing from the bottom: a copyright statement and credit to the designer.

Thanks to Slavik for sending in the link!