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Airbnb Experiences — Airbnb expands beyond rentals — now hosting Experiences
Airbnb Experiences offers unique experiences – from cooking to scenic tours – with locals.
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@_jacksmith they have tried this for years. This is just another attempt. From concierge services to pre-packaged experiences to now a direct competitor to Vayable
Actually I stand corrected, it seems some experiences are live after all, and not just in San Francisco. Here's a shopping tour in Paris Airbnb experience https://www.airbnb.com/experienc... I can't find one place where all experiences are listed but if you type in https://www.airbnb.com/experienc... (and a number after /) you can see them. Can anyone find anything particularly cool or random that is offered!? :-)
Woah, this is huge. The travel startup graveyard is full of P2P tours and activities providers, none of which managed to gain much traction - @couchsurfing probably comes closest, but it's far from mainstream. @axk does a good job of explaining why it's so hard in this analysis from @denschaal of @skift: “Margins are incredibly tight (just 10% in some cases) and the promiscuous behavior of guides in terms of working with multiple P2P marketplaces will prove very challenging,” Kremer says. “The amount of distribution volume required to make things work at those margins has no chance of materializing anytime soon." (from 2013)
http://skift.com/2013/02/26/spec...
But there's a clear desire for this and maybe AirBnb has the clout (and distribution) to finally make it work.
@gillianim Very true. The travel industry has fallen into a vicious cycle of being forced by aggregators to compete on price. They have a very heavy technical environment to work with just to maintain their network and fleet. Compound that with the lack of traceability with existing tour operators makes it a hard space for incumbents to innovate in. Hopefully AirBNB can get this off the ground, would love to try it next time i'm in SF. Particularly excited to see how this will work in a developing economy.
@haichenw @gillianim what I find more interesting is that AirBNB is well suited to run this as a loss leader which could serve to capture significant market share while avoiding (ignoring) the slim margins. They've done this before (free verified photos for listings) to add value to the service
@a_nater @gillianim agreed...they could run it at a loss for a long time. Wouldn't surprise me if that's the strategy they take.
@a_nater @gillianim My question would be do they need to run it as a loss leader? There are hardly any decent competitors in the market, and certainly none with a reputable, trusted Identity system which would facilitate this crowd sourced model.
I am confused - havent they been doing this since quite some time? You always received an email after booking a flat "Things you can do" and those were activities provided by AirBnB users
Really interesting play by Airbnb. Competition for Vayable, WithLocals, EatWith etc it seems. It doesn't appear to be live yet though - there's no where you can browse experiences is there?
I wonder what Mark Cuban thinks about this considering his recent Rent Like a Champion investment on Shark Tank?
Fascinating, competes with "community food" category: EatWith, GrubWithUs, Feastly for sit-downs; Josephine, MenuNextDoor, MyTable for take-out...
Anyone experience cooking hosts? How was the food?
Should be able to activate a subset of their hosts which reduces S(upply)AC & up sell guests which reduces CAC, liberating margin for community!
@8artd yeah I was thinking that as well. This is a kind of 'Uber-like' move, in that they now start to take on many other startups as competitors.
@_jacksmith vertical to horizontal move, really helps marketing spend as the potential frequency of use rises :-)
My friend and I were talking about this about a year ago. He was like AirBnb for local experiences, and I thought that Airbnb might be the best one to offer that. Hope they expand quickly.
Went on one which was a photography session in Toronto with a professional photographer (with only 2 other "students". The host was very friendly, generous with his time, knowledgeable, and I learned a lot.
In cities, even in places you've lived your whole life, it's often really hard to find interesting activities. AirBnB experiences are presented in a beautiful UI from an already reliable web platform, and there's a lot to choose from. Makes a great gift idea too. Only thing is that they can be expensive.
Pros:Curated experiences with verified reviews from verified users, friendly and generous hosts who aren't as focused on profit margins
Cons:Expensive, may be limited options depending on location
This is a great complementary addition to Airbnb. I used @EatWith, and really enjoyed the experience. It will be interesting to watch it.
Love this idea. I'm travelling to SF in that first week of Dec, I'll have to drop a line and see if they have reached their quota of beta testers :)
AFAIK this is something Airbnb has been testing since 2014 in some locations like SF (http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/16...). In Europe it also has a partnership with Trip4real, a travel experience startup from Barcelona, which shows up at the end of the Airbnb booking process (http://novobrief.com/trip4real-p...)
I've been using Vayable.com for this for awhile. It's almost the exact what Airbnb is describing. Should be interesting!
An average 'experience' will probably have lower value compared to rentals but the potential volume of experience bookings can be many times higher. This is such a natural extension for Airbnb bravo well played!
@nodarj definitely true. Though, with families and groups frequenting Airbnb's more than hotels, bookings would likely be for all guests, so a $50 experience becomes a $200 total ticket. Still much lower than the entire stay.
Does anybody know how they will be managing their liability? I know how they cover it for lodging, but I can only imagine that this will be much more complex.
Airbnb expanding into tourism - this is huge. Doing it at a host level is the selling a night on your air bed early concept abstracted to experiences. Very very cool.
An obvious extension of what Airbnb is doing. Look to all the major OTAs (online travel agencies) like Expedia and TripAdvisor for a playbook that Airbnb is likely to follow. They have all added other things travelers book to their booking platform. Airbnb is just an OTA for the peer-to-peer economy. All of the peer-to-peer meal and experience companies have suffered from struggling to aggregate demand and Airbnb does that at huge scale.
However, they will need to build out the specific infrastructure for each of these verticals to make listing and booking as seamless as it is on the accommodation site.
Really hoping that they recruit people who can organize truly unique experiences (ie ones you wouldn't be able to arrange yourself unless you've lived there for a while). For example, I look at host organized experiences of Beijing (where I used to live) and they're all still quite 'touristy'.
A truly unique experience would be something like live a day in the life of the average Beijinger. Take your group to a morning market, a morning stroll through a park (when a lot of retired people come out to do tai chi, dance, and sing), explore a maze of lesser known hutongs (I once randomly discovered a cat cafe tucked away in one), etc.
@sapphli there's still the matter of tour provider (aka host) incentives. Will travelers every pay enough money to make it worth their while?
It works on the high end: https://www.contexttravel.com/
But I'm still not solidly convinced there is a middle ground that makes financial sense for people to take time out of their day to walk around with tourists all day. The middle ground is basically to "rent" a friend for the day...
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