This Is What Airbnb Trips Hosts Really Think of Airbnb's Newest Product

It's been about six months since Airbnb launched Trips, its formal foray into the tours and activities space. While many industry watchers have pondered whether this was a smart financial move on Airbnb's part, the product itself is still in its early stages, even as Airbnb continues to add more and more Trips in cities around the world. Originally starting with just 12 cities, Airbnb plans to have Trips available in 51 cities globally by year's end. Trips is the catchall term the company uses to describe the tours and activities it offers: Experiences refer to shorter activities that are only for one day, while Immersions refer to longer, multi-day tours. Most recently, the company added Trips to cities that include Shanghai, New York City (Harlem for now), and Singapore. And there are also Trips now that offer more intimate music and concert experiences as well. To date, there are now more than 800 Experiences to book, an increase of 60 percent since November. Airbnb also said the typical price per person, across all Experience types, has been $91, and that 91 percent of Experience bookings have been rated with five stars. During a recent talk at the New York Stock Exchange, CEO Brian Chesky said he believes Airbnb's core product, Homes, will account for less than half of the company's total revenue someday. He also said that by 2021, the majority of what Airbnb offers as a business "will be the new things that we are doing as of 2017 on." While there isn't enough data available now to know, with certainty, if Airbnb Trips has been a significantly accretive addition to Airbnb's portfolio, early signs seem fairly positive. A recent report issued by Raymond James research analysts concluded the following: "Beyond social benefits from hyper-personalized, more intimate experiences (e.g., memories, new friends), Trips simultaneously generates brand value (both through word of mouth and repeat usage) and opens up additional monetization paths, thus benefiting long-term margins and free cash flow. In our latest analysis of Experiences, we observe that: 1) supply has increased ~38% since its debut, 2) the growth has been driven by Single Experiences, and 3) this growth in supply and shift in mix drove an average price decline of ~36% in a cohort of six markets (~49% of listings). Net, Airbnb's seen a promising start in one area (supply) and success going forward will be measured by conversion (which, as expected, appears to be very nascent)."