A friend of mine who I met in New York and now lives in Berlin came to stay at my place for a couple of weeks. Some mutual friends were getting married and she made the 16,000km trip just for the wedding. The betrothed couple curated an activities list for the international guests. It was a good and varied list—France-Soir, Footscray Market, Fitzroy Pool—but Melbourne can be a forbidding city for a traveller, even one in possession of a thoroughly-pinned Google map. Friends from abroad who have moved here often describe the first few months or even years as lonely slogs. They were about to head back to Amsterdam or Tokyo until, by chance, they found themselves dissociating in a bathtub with someone they just met on the dancefloor at a houseparty. A bond formed. The new friend invited them into a group of friends. And only then did the city begin to reveal its secrets.
I wanted to offer my friend a little taste of this during her visit, to help her get under the city’s skin. Alas, I have two small kids. The best I could do was offer recommendations in the morning and then enquire about what she did in the evening. The answer was usually: meditating. She had just come from a ten day Vipassana retreat in New Zealand and wanted to maintain her state of semi-transcendance.
“Oh, well, maybe tomorrow you could head into the city and have lunch at the Paramount Food Court,” I’d suggest as she sipped peppermint tea.
“Oscar,” she’d reply, mellowly. “I’m having a nice time.”
This was in March. If my friend had come to visit a few months later, I theoretically could’ve outsourced some of my host anxiety to Airbnb. In May this year, the company announced a new feature to connect tourists with locals who could provide them with an “authentic” experience of a city. It was called Experiences, and it was presented by co-founder Brian Chesky as another outgrowth of the gig-economy. With Experiences, any local with a couple spare hours in the week could become a guide (after being vetted through the app). But there was also an elite level of Airbnb Experience called Originals. These were bespoke and exclusive escapades curated by the most interesting and informed residents of a given postcode. Via Originals, one could learn to dance a K-pop routine with a K-pop star in Seoul, tour Notre Dame with an architect responsible for its restoration, or dress up as an “Otaku Hottie” with Megan Thee Stallion in LA.
What about Melbourne? I downloaded the app, curious to see how a multi-national tech company conceptualised the phenomenology of this city. Would travellers soon be sipping a glass of orange wine with Troye Sivan in his Architecturally Digested home? Pulling weeds in the veggie patch with Helen Garner? Not quite. Listings included: crafting non-alcoholic cocktails in Alphington with a guy called Matt ($130) or going for a jog around the Tan with a LuluLemon ambassador ($60).
Who were the “insiders” that had curated the list? I asked around and was able to identify two of them: the food writers Jess Ho and Michael Harry. Apparently, they had both been approached by an agency working on behalf of Airbnb, asking if they would be Experience Curators—a task that would involve finding in-the-know locals with niche expertise. I reached out to both Ho and Harry, hoping to learn more about the process, but they had both signed NDAs. There was no other option: I'd have to put on my orthopedic sandals, charge my digital camera, pack a day pack, and have an Airbnb Experience myself.
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The first Original I signed up for was called “Expand your library at Melbourne Bookshops.” It was an intimate Experience, with only three other guests, all women of the Elder Millenial or Gen X generations. We met on the corner of Bourke and Exhibition at 10am on a crisp Thursday morning. Our guide was Jaclyn Crupi. Crupi is a bonafide Melbourne literary insider. She has worked at the bookshop Hill of Content on Bourke St for years; she moderates panels at the Wheeler Centre; she has authored numerous successful children’s books; and she has a popular IG account on which she reviews contemporary fiction. Crupi is also an avid gardener and cook, and occasionally hosts pasta-making workshops at her house. When Ho first asked Crupi to become an Originals facilitator, she suggested that Crupi could host one of these authentic pasta-making afternoons for Airbnb. She said no. “I just didn’t feel like having random tourists in my house,” she told me.
The women who had turned up for her book experience were not random tourists but avid followers of Crupi’s content. They paid for the $80 ticket (20% goes to Airbnb) to spend the day consummating a parasocial bond with one of their favourite micro-micro-celebrities. It was like a roaming book club minus the comte and chardonnay.
“I apologise if I forget your names,” Crupi said as we introduced ourselves. “Blame perimenopause.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” one guest consoled. “The other day I forgot the word for branch.”
“Branch?”
“Yes, as in the branch of a tree.”
With that we took off on an ambling excursion to Hill of Content, Paperback Books, and Readings Emporium. As we walked, Crupi inquired after our reading habits, and then, at each store, she offered personalised recommendations, like an amiable Amazon algorithm wrapped in a woolen scarf.
“Oh, you love Olivia Laing? Well, you just have to try Siri Hustvedt.”
The only hiccup came at our final stop for the morning, Metropolis, a bookshop on level 3 at Curtin House, right opposite the P.A.M. store. If you’ve never been, Metropolis is one of those art-and-theory-style stores: less Intermezzo (Sally Rooney) and more Raving (McKenzie Wark). It has a strict no photos policy. The woman behind the counter passed her heavily eye-shadowed eyes over our Uniqlo-clad, BookTok-adjacent group with unmasked disdain. We left without buying anything and had a group photo on the stairwell for Crupi’s grid. After saying goodbye, I popped my head into P.A.M. to see how much they’re charging for a flower hat these days. The shop attendant, whose brows were peroxided, asked me how the tour was. “Not a tour,” I said, briefly describing Airbnb’s new Experience feature. She asked if anyone could host an Experience and I said yes. She grew thoughtful. She told me that retail is just one of her many hustles, but that her real passion is floristry.
“Maybe I could run a floristry Experience,” she mused. “Like, I could take people through the fresh flower markets and show them how to arrange beautiful bouquets.”
Her idea—along with Crupi’s genuinely enjoyable tour—made me wonder whether Airbnb was actually onto something. In the coming days, I started to look at the city slightly differently, not just as a place to live and work, but as a zone of potential Experiences waiting to be monetised. Slurp your way through the noodle joints of upper Swanston St (find out if Bill Clinton really did have that second bowl). Take a plunge into the giant vat of soy sauce at Sushi Hub. Ascend the Nicholas Building with The Paris End editors: we begin with a coffee at Cathedral before being disparaged by David from Le Tuffeau. Then, we talk geo-politics with Rosa the watch repair lady and Igor the tailor on level 3. On level 7, we bear witness to one of the most regularly defiled bathrooms in Melbourne, and finally, we unwind with a lengthy discussion on The Phenomenology of Spirit with resident Communist and fisherman Daniel Lopez. How much could we charge for that?
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