Broadcasting live from the AWS re: Invent 2013 conference in Las Vegas, theCUBE streamed the entire Keynote of Mike Curtis, VP of Engineering with AirBnB. Curtis was very adamant that “AirBnB is reinventing travel,” and he went on to explain.

“What we’ve created is a community-driven market place that brings together hosts and guests from around the world, creating glocal, unique, personal travel experiences. All of that starts with our hosts. Today, there are more 350,000 hosts around the world. They are normal people, who have an extra room available at their house, or a house that they are not using. What AirBnB does is connecting the host with the guest. We’re looking for a different kind of travel experience,” said Curtis. “The guests are looking to stay with locals and experience the neighborhood the way a local does.”

This arrangement is great for both parties involved: the host gets to earn a little extra money while the guest gets a unique travel experience. “But that’s not even the best part,” teased Curtis. AirBnB is also great for the cities where we operate.”

Cited in the keynote was a recent economic impact study carried out in New York revealed that 60-70 percent of all hotel rooms are concentrated in midtown Manhattan. That means that a person traveling to NYC only gets to experience mid-town Manhattan. In contrast, 82 percent of AirBnB listings are outside midtown Manhattan.

“In the last 12 months AirBnB has generated more than half a billion dollars in economic activity in NYC alone.” This clearly shows that the idea is clearly catching on. But back in 2009, when AirBnB was only starting, there was only one city with over 1000 listings, and that was New York. One year later it spread to Europe, and in 2011 it started getting global. “The reason it grew so quickly,” explained Curtis, “is the network effect.”

“AirBnB operates now in 192 countries, in over 22.000 cities. It took us 4 years to get to our first 4 million guests. Since the beginning of this year, we’ve added 5 million users to that number, and there’s no sign of slowing down. On any given night, a number of 150.000 people are hosted on AirBnB around the world.”

Getting to the heart of business, Curtis had to get a bit technical: “With all of that growth, we had to deal with some major scaling problems. That’s where AWS comes in. AWS has been our platform from day one. Today we use a wide range of AWS technologies. Pretty much any time we can use an AWS server to solve a problem, we will,” vouched Curtis.

“Photos are really important to us. High quality photos of a listing can make the difference between getting a booking or not. Back in 2010 we had about 300 GB of photos, same as my photo library. Today we have 50 TB and growing all the time.”

Why AWS?

“All of this growth and scale is achieved with a 5 person operations team,” shared Curtis. “What AWS makes possible for us is to concentrate the vast majority of our engineering resources, of our time, of our mindshare on the problem of reinventing travel.”

AWS handles and scales our infrastructure. “One day it will be possible to feel at home anywhere you travel in the world, and AWS is going to be part of how the guests are going to get there,” concluded Mike Curtis at the end of his keynote.