Airbnb Experiences Relaunch: This Is What It’s Likely Going to Look Like

There has been great interest in what Airbnb Experiences will be like when the company relaunches it after what will then be a two-year hiatus.

Here are the broad outlines of what’s likely taking shape, a view we’ve pieced together from sources and Airbnb public statements over the past few months.

• Airbnb will market experiences to locals in addition to travelers.

• The company will make them somewhat more mainstream by selling tickets for major attractions like the Louvre and Vatican tours.

• Airbnb guests can expect offers of in-home private chefs and massage therapists, for example.

• Airbnb will display experiences in “categories,” similar to what it’s been doing for homes and apartments since 2022.

• Pitches for experiences will emphasize video, probably a lot of TikTok-like short-form clips, instead of how it marketed them in the past, predominantly through photos. It is already using more videos for experiences today than it did earlier.

Airbnb declined to comment for this story.

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The Relaunch is Scheduled for May 2025

Airbnb launched experiences in 2016, and it’s been key to CEO Brian Chesky’s vision for the company. But the company is believed to have lost a lot of money on experiences in its early days, and the Airbnb paused signing up new experiences hosts in April 2023.

One reason the company wasn’t able to scale its experiences business is because it targeted experiences for a niche audience, seeking to make each unique and authentic, and downplaying tours and activities with mass market appeal. Homeaway co-founder and investor Carl Shepherd offered his take in 2020 about what went wrong with Airbnb experiences.

Airbnb experiences was still being offered to consumers during the pause in accepting applications, and it is live today, as well. The company began to take applications for new experiences in September 2024. The target date for a wholesale relaunch of experiences is May 2025.

Targeting Locals With Experiences

One way to make more of a viable business out of experiences is to broaden its audience. Airbnb will be trying to do that by tailoring some of those experiences to local audiences in their own towns, and not just to tourists passing through. Selling tickets for mainstream attractions, like rivals GetYourGuide and Viator do, is another move in that direction.

Whether locals will bite at the idea of little-known gems around town or Mafia- foodie-themed tours in the cities where they live will remain to be seen. It’s been tried by startups with little success, but not at the scale that Airbnb can bring to it.

Category Search for Experiences

In Airbnb’s earnings call earlier this month, Chesky, while talking about experiences, said the categories technology was mostly built. Airbnb currently breaks down experiences into a relatively small number of , areas, but the treatment and technology behind categories is expected to be much more robust.

So for experiences you can expect a variation of how Airbnb displays categories of homes and apartments today. These are distinct from the prior way of searching for a stay by typing “amazing views” into a search box, for example.

Make Experiences More Discoverable

Chesky talked a few months ago about the challenges of Airbnb’s experiences product in the past, and he provided hints about how things will change.

He said experiences in the Airbnb app aren’t sufficiently discoverable, and video will give them more appeal to Gen Z travelers. He said experiences after the relaunch would be promoted in a way that was more akin to movie trailers than using static photos, which have been used in the past.

Without providing much detail, Chesky said Airbnb will market experiences at different junctures after booking a stay, and will find new ways to cross-sell them.

Inflluencers and Celebrities

The use of influencers and celebrities, as Airbnb did when it launched Icons, will likely be leveraged in marketing experiences, as well.

“We still think we can have even more unique inventory that you can only find at Airbnb, that’s not on another platform, and we want to recruit some of the most interesting people in the world to be on our platform, and we’re getting a lot of excitement,” Chesky told financial analysts several months ago.

Chesky said Airbnb experiences need to be unique and more affordable, but he didn’t provide specifics on how the company might accomplish that.

The move to offer experiences such as sessions with massage therapists or private chefs in the home is aligned with Airbnb’s stated desire to move beyond the “core” stay experience into more services for guests and hosts. Airbnb’s recent launch of a co-host network to help hosts manage their properties is in line with that too.

Upon the relaunch next year, the big challenge for Airbnb will be how to thread the needle of making its experiences unique — yet more mainstream.