SEEMINGLY not content with having disrupted the accommodation sector alone, Airbnb has branched outside people’s houses and into the sightseeing and touring arena.
Billed as the “most significant” development in Airbnb’s eight-year history, Trips is a “people-powered platform designed to make travel both easy and magical,” the US-based company declared.
“Until now, Airbnb has been about homes,” Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said in late November when launching the Trips portfolio which spans three key areas — Experiences, Places and Homes.
Trips aspires to “make travel magical again”, Chesky said. The Experiences element encompasses around 500 handcrafted activities in a dozen cities around the globe, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and Detroit in the US.
Experiences are designed and led by local experts, and vary from a single activity to immersive multi-day activities, such as learning about and driving classic cars in Malibu. There are numerous other options focused on sports, food and wine, entertainment, fashion, wellness, nature and other areas.
Under Places are a range of hundreds of thousands of locations that Airbnb’s “community of trusted insiders” recommends as hidden gems within their city described as “an alternative to aggregated tourist lists that funnel people to the same places”.
Complementing the collection are Airbnb’s Insider Guidebooks, listing 100 suggestions for experiences such as the perfect route for a marathoner and the locations of up-and-coming chefs. Initially, there are six Insider Guidebooks for Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Havana, Nairobi and Seoul, with more to come.
Also being rolled out in L.A. and San Francisco (as well as Paris, London, Tokyo and Seoul), Airbnb has also partnered with Detour to offer a selection of experiential audio walking tours enabling house-sharers to “discover neighbourhoods in a totally unique and authentic way”.
So where to next for Airbnb? Watch this space for the company’s expansion into Flights and Services in the future.
