Latest news with #Experiences
Skift
11-06-2025
- Business
- Skift
Airbnb's Poaching Experiences, IHG's U.S. Bounce and Meliá's Expansion Plans
For today's pod we look at Airbnb's aggressive expansion approach, IHG's good news in the U.S., and Melia's equally good news about Mediterranean numbers. Skift Daily Briefing Podcast Listen to the day's top travel stories in under four minutes every weekday. Listen to the day's top travel stories in under four minutes every weekday. Skift Travel Podcasts Good morning from Skift. It's Wednesday, June 11. Here's what you need to know about the business of travel today. Airbnb has been outed by two tour platforms for trying to poach their guides as the short-term rental giant looks to relaunch its Experiences business, writes Executive Editor Dennis Schaal. ToursByLocals and Withlocals said separately that people with Airbnb email addresses created accounts on their sites, and then violated their terms and conditions by messaging tour guides on their platforms to recruit them to Airbnb Experiences. ToursByLocals CEO Lisa Chen said those creating accounts on the site sought to take the conversations off the platform. She said ToursByLocals disabled the Airbnb accounts. Withlocals CEO Matthijs Keij wrote about Airbnb's activity in a recent Linkedin post, saying it wasn't in the spirit of fair play. Listen to This Podcast Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Youtube | RSS Next, InterContinental Hotels Group CEO Elie Maalouf is downplaying early-year turbulence in U.S. inbound travel, writes Hospitality Reporter Luke Martin. IHG saw a drop in transatlantic bookings in March, which Maalouf partly attributed to Easter taking place in April. However, he noted IHG saw travel from Europe to the U.S. rebound in April. Maalouf added that international visitors make up just 5% of IHG's bookings in the U.S., with only a small portion coming from Europe. Maalouf also said IHG is bullish on expansion in Asia, citing younger populations and faster-growing economies across the region as drivers of growth. IHG expects to open its 1,000th hotel in China within the next two years. Finally, Meliá Hotels has seen a surge in U.S. travelers at its resorts in the Mediterranean. And CEO Gabriel Escarrer is looking to expand in what he considers emerging destinations, writes Hospitality Reporter Luke Martin. Escarrer said in an interview with Skift that Meliá has not seen a slowdown in demand thus far, adding the company has been encouraged by the number of forward bookings across its European properties. He also said that Meliá is pursuing an expansion strategy focused on what he calls a 'vacation axis' spanning regions such as the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and the Middle East. Escarrer pointed to Albania, where he said Meliá is the number one hotel company, as a priority for the company.
Skift
10-06-2025
- Business
- Skift
Airbnb Accused of Poaching Tour Guides From Rival Platforms to Grow Experiences
Whether the poaching attempts were a rogue or not, it's clear that Airbnb is going all-out to compete in its new experiences business. Airbnb needs to expand its tour supply for its newly relaunched Experiences business, and two rival tour platforms say Airbnb tried to poach their guides. Canada-headquartered ToursByLocals and Netherlands-based Withlocals said separately that people with Airbnb email addresses created accounts on their sites, and then violated their terms and conditions by messaging tour guides to recruit them to Airbnb Experiences. 'There's a better way to grow the travel experiences space and it's not by scraping platforms or poaching hosts," ToursByLocals CEO Lisa Chen said in a statement. "At ToursByLocals, our entire model is built around empowering local business
Axios
15-05-2025
- Business
- Axios
Airbnb to offer exclusive "experiences"
Airbnb is launching a new tier of exclusive, curated "experiences" — think hip hop wine tours in Portland or a Kansas City barbecue with Patrick Mahomes. Why it matters: The company is increasingly going beyond what it is best-known for, arranging home rentals for travelers. Driving the news: The so-called Originals is one of several new offerings announced at Airbnb's 2025 Summer Release event this week in Los Angeles. What they're saying: Jay Carney, the company's global head of policy and communications, tells Axios that Originals events are the highest tier of experiences they have to offer. "These are once-in-a-lifetime kind of experiences because of who the host is and what they're offering. It's that combination of 'I can't believe I'm doing this with this person' and the fact you can only do it on Airbnb." Airbnb has been offering "experiences" since 2016, but the new Originals promise to be more exclusive, with prices ranging from $20 to $200 per guest. How it works: From the home page, search your city or the one you're visiting under the Experiences tab, select dates and the number of guests. Originals will be labeled as such in the search results and you can book by clicking on the listing. Airbnb also announced that Experiences will be "vetted for quality" and are now available in 650 cities worldwide. Later this year, guests will be able to see who's going before they book, message the group or individual guests during the experience, and stay in touch afterward. The bottom line: The vacation rental company is aiming to get people to use the app even if they aren't traveling.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Airbnb's new app for ‘services' is getting shot down by critics — here's why CEO Brian Chesky should be thrilled
Brian Chesky took the stage in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday to tell a story about the future. That story went something like this: 17 years ago, when Chesky cofounded Airbnb, people were skeptical. Who would ever stay in a stranger's home, they snarled. (In 2008, seven investors rejected the company, turning down what would have been a 10% stake for $150,000.) But the startup defied the odds—it's now a verb, noun, and a publicly-traded Fortune 500 company with an $84 billion market cap. Now, Chesky explained, it was time for the company to once again blaze a new trail by redefining what it means to 'Airbnb' something. With the just-unveiled Airbnb Services and a relaunched Airbnb Experiences, Chesky painted a picture of a world where you rely on Airbnb as your hub for a singular vacation experience. Chesky talked about Airbnb as a marketplace for unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime moments. Think: making pasta with a chef in Rome, dancing with a K-pop star in Seoul, exploring Notre Dame with a restoration architect, wrestling with a luchador in Mexico City, or even spending a Sunday with Patrick Mahomes. Chesky closed with a new tagline: 'Now you can Airbnb more than an Airbnb.' The idea is that you'd 'Airbnb' a massage on vacation—and would eventually start 'Airbnb-ing' massages, makeup artists, and hair stylists not just on vacation, but when you're at home. In short, it was the launch of a superapp that was both a mild repudiation of tech—'somewhere along the way, something drifted, and we started spending more time looking at screens and less time in the real world,' Chesky told the audience—and an incredibly Silicon Valley display. This presentation, in which Chesky put his best 'founder mode' persona on display, was met with both fanfare and criticism. Zynga founder Mark Pincus hailed Chesky's performance as 'Steve Jobs-esque.' Others were skeptical that Airbnb users will turn to the app in their daily, non-vacation lives, and questioned the marketplace pricing Airbnb is using. The truth, almost definitely, lies somewhere in between. There are certain ways in which the idea makes good sense. For example, if one of the criticisms of staying in an Airbnb is that you lose the amenities of a hotel, it tracks that the company would want to fix that. Travel is a spectacularly fragmented industry and Airbnb isn't alone in seeing the level of white space open to consolidation—McKinsey has estimated that the global market for travel experiences is an opportunity that's worth north of $1 trillion, but which is scattered among a few online platforms and 'countless smaller operators.' At the same time, Airbnb's ambition of becoming a destination for experiences isn't new; the Airbnb Experiences product is, after all, a relaunch. Airbnb Finance Chief Ellie Mertz described the company's earlier effort as a victim of circumstance. 'We launched Experiences many years ago,' Mertz said in an interview. 'We started to scale it. The pandemic hit, we put it on the back burner, and haven't really done anything with it until this point.' With the benefit of a 'multi-year pause,' Airbnb reimagined Experiences, Mertz said, bringing more flexible pricing, stronger vetting to ensure top quality offerings, and a redesigned app that makes it easier for travelers to find and book experiences that fit their trip. 'The current year is about launching,' she said. 'We want to get these products and services into our consumers' hands… Our ambition is to drive these businesses such that they are on a standalone basis material contributors to our top line. What Brian and I have said in the past is the ambition is that we could build these businesses into billion dollar revenue streams over an order of magnitude, in a three-to-five-year period.' For a company that generated $11.1 billion in revenue last year, an additional billion dollars on the top line could be meaningful. But ringing up that revenue will take a lot of work, and money, as Airbnb essentially tries to create new consumer habits. To help make the case for Airbnb Experiences, the company is launching Airbnb Originals—a set of premium experiences, underpinned by starpower. For example: Megan Thee Stallion was in the room as Chesky touted the Airbnb Original that the company curated with her—a day with the star rapper in a specially-built anime house. The goal for experiences like this is that they are days you remember for the rest of your life. At the end of the day, I was taken on one such surprise experience—a listening party with Chance the Rapper in LA, where the beloved indie rapper previewed about ten new songs to a room full of influencers and, well, me. We sat in a room filled with bean bag chairs, green-glowing headphones, and screens filled with lyrics. It was an hour and a half block where the world stopped. It was intimate, surprising, and the kind of marshalling of starpower that felt pretty authentic—Chance the Rapper, whose last studio album came out in 2019, stood at the front of the room when the demo was finished, answering questions about his music that only so many people have heard. Airbnb did not share details about the financial terms involved in partnering with these celebrities, though it seems safe to guess that whatever it is (revenue share, a fee, or some other arrangement), it's not cheap. And that gets to the tricky part of what Airbnb is trying to do, as it bolts a fancy new addition onto a sharing economy, scale business. I don't think it's impossible that Airbnb's push into these new verticals works—maybe I'd want to book a makeup artist through Airbnb as a consumer—but I don't know if you can curate at scale a marketplace of singular, intimate experiences. They are often by definition limited and magic is hard to screen for quality on a global level. The idea is somewhat paradoxical and may very well not work as critics think. At the same time, you have to wonder—it may also be about as cock-eyed an idea as staying in other people's homes on vacation. This story was originally featured on
Irish Independent
14-05-2025
- Business
- Irish Independent
‘It's going to be a bigger part of your life' – Airbnb revamps app with tours and luxury services in push beyond rentals
The expansion comes as Airbnb's core rentals business has seen slowing growth After more than a year of teasing expansion plans beyond home rentals, Airbnb launched an overhauled app that's not just for homeowners and travellers, but also for personal chefs, hair stylists, trainers and tour operators to offer their services widely. The company, whose name is synonymous with holiday stays, revealed its new Services offering and relaunched its Experiences tour-booking product at an event on Tuesday in Los Angeles. 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, makeup and nail appointments. The services can be reserved anytime even without a vacation booked, and many of them include "an entry offering below $50," 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 $66. Think of an Aran sweater knitting class in Ireland, a tour of the restored Notre-Dame cathedral with an architect from its restoration team in Paris, or a ramen-making class in Japan led by an award-winning chef. And similar to the branded stays it promoted last year, Airbnb will offer limited-time celebrity-led experiences, like playing football and having Kansas City barbecue with Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes (places are allotted by a draw, and judging process here). "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 Chesky has previously said would bring in $1 billion or more in annual revenue, comes as Airbnb's core rentals business has seen slowing growth following a post-pandemic travel boom. Earlier this month, 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. ADVERTISEMENT Learn more Airbnb has been compensating by seeking growth outside the US. This has included running region-specific marketing campaigns and adding more local payment methods in Latin America, Europe and Asia. A focus on quality Services will be available in 260 cities at launch, with Experiences starting in 650 cities. Airbnb will take a roughly 15pc commission fee from providers for each booking, in line with the rate it charges homeowners, 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, Chesky said last year. That's 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. This 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. "We don't accept things that we don't think will sell," Chesky said in the interview. "We want to make sure we can stand behind them." The company will "probably manually vet them forever," he added. The process will get more efficient, he said, in part thanks to existing systems used to verify hosts' identities. It will also use third-party services for background checks and internal tools to validate professional certifications and licenses. The promise of curation differs from some of the leading travel experience marketplaces, such as Viator and GetYourGuide. TD Cowen analysts estimate each of those brands generates annual $3 billion in gross bookings by selling tickets to landmarks, sightseeing tours and activities. "We're not forcing the guest to weed through hundreds or thousands of random experiences to find a thing that works," said Stephenson, who leads a global team of hundreds of staff identifying and onboarding unique activities and services within each city. "We're going to have a large inventory, but we're going to have the best, and you're going to have high confidence that when you go on an Airbnb experience related to the Eiffel Tower, it's going to be fantastic." Airbnb has learned a lot from their mistakes from the first attempt at Experiences in 2016, where there was "too much of a focus" on non-tourist endeavours, said Douglas Quinby, co-founder and CEO of travel activities research firm Arival. The reality is that a lot of travellers still want to wear a beret and get a croissant under the Eiffel Tower, he said. There are also "positive signs" about Airbnb's willingness to engage with tour operators, relaxing a prior policy that prohibited hosts from mixing Airbnb guests and those from other platforms, as well as building software connectivity to other booking systems, Quinby added. Future Possibilities Investors may be surprised by the lack of a car rental service, something direct competitors Expedia and offer and that Chesky said was under consideration, in a 2023 interview with the Financial Times. Stephenson said it's still early days for the newly expanded platform, but suggested the company could add car rentals over time. "They're not as unique as some of these services and experiences that we're starting with," he said of car rental services. "But what I'm excited about is we've built a foundation that can enable that in the future." Longer term, 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 this year, 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, 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," Chesky said. "I want to basically use technology and AI to get people off devices into the real world."
