Airbnb does this too. They give all of their employees an annual stipend to travel via Airbnb, so that they can regularly experience the app from the perspective of a guest. I think they also provide benefits for employees who host guests, for the same reasons.
When you think about it, it seems so obvious that companies should do things like these, yet it still seems so rare. It's easy to fall out of touch with your users and product.
Wouldn't the equivalent be incentivizing employees to rent out their own place on Airbnb? I'm sure that plenty of Uber and Lyft employees are customers without it being a Big Deal.
Yes, that'd be the equivalent to this specific situation. Airbnb incentivizes that as well. I don't remember the exact details, but in an interview with one of the founders, he said they have a program for employees who host Airbnb guests.
I have some friends at AirBnB and I've heard it's much more modest, like $300/yr or something. My experience with these type of "dogfooding" credits is that companies are much more generous when they're smaller, so it could be that older employees get more than newer employees.
That makes sense. $300 is enough to cover Airbnb housing costs for at least a few days in pretty much any location around the world, so they probably still get value out of it.
When you think about it, it seems so obvious that companies should do things like these, yet it still seems so rare. It's easy to fall out of touch with your users and product.