The redesign of Airbnb, and its impulse to allow users to Airbnb more than a holiday or escape, has been out for a few weeks. The idea is that Airbnb more than a beautiful cabin on a beach, also resorting to the service, for example, when you want to experience a city that is near home or add some adventure to your trip abroad.
We have already broken down, including the launch of experiences and services, as well as the new look for application. Everything feels much more elegant, with images that fit the fly, a mini social network and a kind of passport that saves all the information on your trip. So, if you have a favorite place, you can easily share it with a friend. Everything feels very material.
Here we are taking a look under the hood and we discover how Airbnb is making the application better for you. The company has rebuilt its entire technological battery for application and service as a whole, which means that you will find easier navigation with three options at the top: homes, experiences and services.
In addition, there is a redesigned profile that makes it easier to take a look and even connect with the people with whom he has had experiences. The reconstruction effort allows what has already been launched, while establishing Airbnb for the future, a note that Jud Coplan, vice president of marketing products on Airbnb, shared with Techradar.
“One of the enormous benefits of reconstructing architecture and rethinking, really, the infrastructure of the application was that we created something that can expand beyond the 10 categories of services.” Coplan told me.
I was referring to the 10 that currently exist (chefs, photographers, massages, spa treatments, personal training, hair treatments, makeup, nails, prepared meals and restaurants), but hinted that the expansion is very possible, adding: “We have created a new airbnb that can go even beyond what we have been talking about today.”
That could mean that we see the deliveries of integrated groceries, so it may be well supplied when it reaches its Airbnb to prepare dinner, or perhaps that even means that you can order directly to your home.
It really is an expansion of the platform to book these services, whether it is in your hometown or on a trip. Coplan told me how his family had reserved an experience in his hometown of San Francisco, a kind of stay excursion.
The 10 aforementioned options have more activity fears, such as cooking, walks in the city, learning a new skill and even more exclusive with celebrities.
During the key note, the Airbnb CEO, Brian Chesky, highlighted the importance of people, noting that it is the real people who are experts who offer these experiences and services, and are real people offered by their homes, lofts or Airbnb apartments.
Here an element of AI is used, an example is a photographic tour with AI, as Coplan explained. “For the houses, if you upload all your photos, we recognize them, we organize them, we present them very well,” all with the aim of making the list easier and theoretically helping to encourage more reservations. There are also rapid responses driven by AI, in which, for a host, the application will automatically suggest an answer that could be sent.
For services and experiences, the two new Airbnb offers use AI to recommend what could find more attractive. Base this on “where they are on their trip, their past reservations, their current trip, which they have told us in their profile,” Copan explained.
Finally, in AI, Coplan also shared that Airbnb began to implement an AI assistant for customer service in the US. In English, “that allows people to make a natural language conversation with customer service and get answers to questions very easily.” It will be interesting to see how this works and what feedback users provide.
In the new aspect and flow of the application, it was clear that Coplan and the Airbnb team focused on the human element, emphasizing that what one can book is linked to a real person. He pointed out that the color palette, animations and dimensionality become the real world, giving an idea of what he could experience.
Even more interesting, and perhaps insinuating the future of Airbnb, it is the aspect of the community. “We didn’t want this to be a place where you have followers, where you know people online,” Coplan explained. “The people you see are people you know from the real world, and so that the connection page within your profile, those are people with whom you have traveled and those are people that you have met in your experiences.”
Without a doubt, it is a unique and more intentional approach, rooted in a shared experience. Now, it is completely opted, and there are privacy controls that allow it to turn off this aspect of the community.
Separated from the community, but also housed within the profile, it is a kind of experience similar to the passport, which allows you to look back where you have been easily and share the details. Like a card on Apple’s wallet, it has a brightness and brightness effect when you move your phone.
While the main airbnb event is its annual summer launch, and that is done with 2025, I suspect that we will listen more than a year from now on, and I am intrigued to see how far the technological stack can reach. For now, I am looking for an experience to try.
