Want a personal tour, chef or trainer? You can now book them through Airbnb

NEW YORK - After more than a year of teasing expansion plans beyond home rentals, Airbnb launched an overhauled app that is not just for home owners and travellers, but also for personal chefs, hairstylists, trainers and tour operators to offer their services widely.

The company, whose name has become synonymous with vacation stays, revealed its new Services offering and relaunched its Experiences tour-booking product on May 13. 

It has vetted providers to offer 10 categories of in-home services, including personally cooked meals, prepared food items, full-service catering, photography, spa treatments, massages, personal training, hair, make-up and nail appointments.

The services can be reserved any time even without a vacation booked, and many of them include “an entry offering below US$50 (S$65)”, Airbnb said. 

The new Experiences business touts a trimmed-down list of nearly 20,000 tours and cooking classes, curated for quality and uniqueness, with an average cost of US$66. Think: a tour of the restored Notre-Dame Cathedral with an architect from its restoration team, or a ramen-making class in Japan led by an award-winning chef. 

And similar to the branded stays it promoted in 2024, Airbnb will offer limited-time celebrity-led experiences, such as playing American football and having Kansas City barbecue with Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who is one of five quarterbacks in National Football League history to win three or more Super Bowls as a starter.

“What if people monetise their biggest asset in their life, which is not their house probably, but their time? That’s exactly what we’re doing with the launch of Services and Experiences,” said chief executive officer Brian Chesky in an interview ahead of the event.

“What it means is Airbnb is not just a marketplace for vacation rentals. It’s a global community in the real world where you can travel and live anywhere, and you can certainly use Airbnb every week now in your own city. It’s just going to be a bigger part of your life.”

The ambitious expansion into new business lines, which Mr Chesky had previously said would bring in US$1 billion or more in annual revenue, comes as Airbnb’s core rental business has seen slowing growth following a post-pandemic travel boom.

Earlier in May, the company provided a weak financial outlook for the second quarter, citing softer travel demand in the US stemming from broader uncertainties about the economy. Airbnb has been compensating by seeking growth outside the US.

A controlled rollout

The services will be available in 260 cities at launch, with Experiences starting in 650 cities.

Airbnb will take a roughly 15 per cent commission fee from Services and Experiences providers for each booking, in line with the rate it charges homeowners on the platform, according to chief business officer Dave Stephenson.

But these new products would require more than one or two years to scale before they reach a network effect, Mr Chesky said in 2024.

That is partly because Airbnb intends to vet every provider manually for quality – it said its services providers have an average 10 years of experience and many are renowned in their field. It will also use third-party services for background checks and internal tools to validate professional certifications and licences.

That is in contrast to how it runs the home rental business, where anyone can host. The lower bar of entry for homeowners has led to saturation in some markets in recent years, prompting Airbnb to take steps to cull low-quality listings.

The promise of curation differs from some of the leading travel experience marketplaces, such as TripAdvisor’s Viator and the SoftBank Group-backed GetYourGuide. TD Cowen analysts estimate that each of those brands generates an annual US$3 billion in gross bookings by selling tickets to landmarks, sightseeing tours and activities.

Longer term, Mr Chesky sees the expansion as a way for the company to collect more data on users’ travel habits and make better in-app recommendations, with a touch of social networking.

Later in 2025, Airbnb will let users see other guest profiles before they book an experience, and message other participants during or after the activity to stay in touch.

All that user activity will help produce travel inspiration content on the Airbnb platform in the coming years, sometimes with the help of AI, Mr Chesky said. 

The vision, he said, is a digital version of a promotional travel magazine that Airbnb used to print before the pandemic prompted it to scale back some non-essential endeavours.

“I think the profiles and the community and the relationship we have, especially our guests, is probably the biggest asset we’re going to have,” Mr Chesky said.

“I want to basically use technology and AI to get people off devices into the real world.”
BLOOMBERG