For Airbnb owners, the low season can be such a pain. Visitors dry up, and the calendar for the month has huge gaps where no one is booked.

Micro-currencies open a new opportunity for Airbnb owners to take advantage of their spare capacity during this season. With Micro-currencies, owners can offer their unit in exchange for digital micro-currencies issued by other Airbnb hosts.

This would mean that hosts could stay at a unit at effectively no cost, since the nights they are giving away in exchange would otherwise be sitting empty and not earning them anything anyway.

The result of enabling trade of unbooked nights during the low season would mean more people enjoying stays at Airbnbs with a given number of Airbnb units on the market.

To see how this could work in practice, let’s look at an example:

Meet Alfonso. Alfonso owns a 1 bedroom unit in Rome. From October to March, his unit sits empty for half the nights.

One day in November, in a gloomy mood from seeing that his unit is not booked for most of the month, Alfonso creates his own digital micro-currency, and advertises that he accepts micro-currencies issued by other Airbnb hosts for stays at his unit for the month of November.

Suddenly he gets a booking from Stacey who owns an Airbnb back in her home town of Miami. Stacey issues a currency called Ocean’s Breeze dollars, named after the description of her unit on Airbnb: ‘Ocean’s Breeze Tower suite’. Stacey pays Alfonso 450 Ocean’s Breeze dollars for 3 nights stay in his Rome unit, enough to pay for 3 nights at her Miami unit during the low-season, or 2 nights during the more expensive high-season.

The following week Alfonso decides to visit New York. He wants to spend the credit he has for Stacey’s unit in Miami to pay for his accommodations in New York, so he creates a post in the New York City page for Craigslist, offering his Miami currency in exchange for staying at any New York City Airbnb unit.

The post was seen by Craiglist users in New York. Jeffrey, who lives in New York, sees the post, and decides to take Alfonso up on his offer, as he travels to Miami every December to visit his parents. Jeffrey spends the 450 Ocean’s Breeze dollars for a three night stay.

All three parties in this situation come out ahead, and see their calendar filled with more bookings, while being able to travel to beautiful places at no expense plus get ideas from other Airbnb hosts on how to more effectively manage their Airbnb. This is the potential of personal micro-currencies.

Airbnb hosts will even have the option to sell the Airbnb micro-currencies they receive from other hosts to travelers who would love to get credit for rentals at a discount.