As a concept, Airbnb is awesome. Why spend a ton of money renting a hotel, when you can rent a furnished apartment from someone who isn’t using it when you’ll be in town? Or maybe you just want to rent a couch? Or a boat? But maybe that’s all thinking a little small. Why not say, rent an entire village? Or a city? Or even a country? Well now you can.
Perhaps you’d like to rent the mountain village of Brand in Austria? Sure. That will be $65,000 a night.
Or maybe you’d prefer a German wine country village? Okay, $50,000 a night.
How about a village in Switzerland. Yep, you can have that too for $60,000 a night.
But the crown jewel has to be Liechtenstein. Yes, you can rent the entire small country. The cost? $70,000 a night — with a minimum two night stay.
Who’s in?
Okay, yes, this is all more or less a cute marketing idea — you won’t actually be able to evict the 33,000 other people that live in Liechtenstein, for example — but it’s awesome and genius. Airbnb has teamed up with Xnet, a Liechtenstein based event production and marketing firm, to make this happen, Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky tells us.
Here’s a bit more from their blog post:
Rent a Village by Xnet partners with these destinations to transform them into highly customized settings for events, corporate retreats, conferences, and more. With Xnet and Airbnb, events take place throughout the idyllic landscape of your host destination, not in some generic hotel. The local people earn a living because each event draws heavily on local vendors and service providers for everything from accommodations and catering, to infrastructure and activity production.
Apparently, you can even do things like organize organize parades, rename streets (I assume temporarily), and more.
I don’t see why we can’t rent an entire country for a future TechCrunch Disrupt. We’ll get to work on that.