At Airbnb, new services and “experiences”

For 17 years, Airbnb has taken the hotel industry, and now, two billion guests later, the company has increased competition. In an announcement today, Brian Chesky, Managing Director of Airbnb, said that the company will offer the types of services generally found in hotels, including room service, spa treatments and personal training, all reserved for the redesigned Airbnb application. Other services could include meals prepared by professional chefs and living room treatments such as hair, nails and makeup.

The company also reinvents Airbnb experiences, its service which offers visits and events organized by experts, to highlight cultural, culinary, sports and authentic well-being activities managed by the locals. The offers are available in 650 cities, including a visit to the recently restored cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris with Axelle Ponsonnet, one of the architects who restored the cathedral after it is partially burned in 2019. A master’s class in Ramens in Tokyo with Chef Saburo Ishigoka and an experience of Lubre de Lubre with a professional wrestler in Mexico other news.

“Airbnb is currently used as a name and verb, and that means a place to stay,” said Chesky in a recent interview. “The question we then asked was whether you could Airbnb more than a airbnb and essentially monetize the biggest asset of your life, which is probably not your home, but your time, your passion and your skill set.”

The company tested the idea when it launched Airbnb experiences in 2016, but faced problems on quality and reliability.

Mitch Bach, Managing Director and Co-founder of Trip School, an independent organization that trains tourist guides, said that the main problem with original deployment was that experience providers, although deeply anchored in their local culture, did not have the professionalism of the tourist guides formed.

Airbnb “has deliberately avoided tourist attractions, which is bread and butter from a market like Gotyourguide or Viator,” said Bach. “I think that their bet was that around this brand and the genius of Airbnb’s position on the market, they could evolve in an organic way, but they noticed very clearly that they could not.”

In the restart, Airbnb said that it focuses on quality and professionalism, with a rigorous and continuous verification of “expertise, reputation and authenticity of tourist suppliers”.