UNIT 4. HOLIDAYS AND TOURISM - Exercise 3

Read the following passage about “The rise of Airbnb“ and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the option that best fits each of the numbered blanks.
In 2007, design graduates, Joe Gebbie and Brian Chesky, were struggling to pay the rent for their San Francisco apartment. Hearing that there was a conference coming to town and there were no hotel rooms available, they created the website airbedandbreakfast.com where they advertised three airbeds in their home at $80 each a night, breakfast included. Only six days later, they had three guests sleeping on their floor. They knew immediately ___(1)___.
Being budding entrepreneurs, the pair decided to take their idea further. They enlisted Gebbie's former flatmate, Nathan Blecharczyk, a computer science graduate, ___(2)___. Their idea was to target conferences and festivals across the USA, getting local people to list their rooms and travellers to book them. The new website was completed just in time for the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, at which Barack Obama was due to speak in front of 80,000 people. Within a week, ___(3)___, but did not solve their financial problems, as the site was not making any money.
The team decided that they would have to handle payment for the bookings. They began to charge three per cent to the host and between six and twelve per cent to the traveller, depending on the price of the booking. Meanwhile, investors ___(4)___. By April 2009, when larger investments began to arrive, they moved the company out of their flat into a new state-of-the-art office and hired more staff.
Since then Airbnb has gone from strength to strength. The company now has over 1.5 million listings in 34,000 cities in 190 countries, and ___(5)___.
(Adapted from Global friends)