Airbnb Is Back With Updates
06.12.2023 - 04:15
/ skift.com
/ Brian Chesky
/ Srividya Kalyanaraman
/ Sarah Kopit
Good morning, readers! I hope you’re have your reading glasses on, this is a long one.
Let’s hit it.
On the menu today:
The much-awaited Airbnb’s winter release is here.
Among the list of embellishments is “Guest Favorites,” new tools for hosts and a review revamp.
The Guest favorite badges will be used to identify highly-rated properties. Around 2 million of Airbnb’s 7 million listings will receive this badge, signifying ratings averaging above 4.9, strong reliability, and quality customer service. Guests can filter their searches for “Guest Favorites.”
New tools for hosts include: AI-powered photo tours of their properties, integrating smart locks into their Airbnb accounts for unique access codes, accessing more transparency in total pricing, comparing prices with competitors, and enhanced earnings and messaging tools.
Additionally, Airbnb is revamping ratings and reviews for a more guest-friendly experience, offering sorting options and additional reviewer information.
Skift editor-in-chief Sarah Kopit sat down with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky (and his two big Golden Retrievers) and here’s the gist:
On Hotel Prices
“And I think a year from now, by the way, hold me to this prediction. Next release will probably be next October. We’re going to sit, if not in this room, a different room. And I want you and I to revisit if hotel prices are higher or lower than this time. And then are housing prices higher or lower? You’d think the theory is that if we’re driving up prices, if restricted, the prices will come down. If it were meaningfully that, we should check in a year. And we’ll see,” Chesky said.
On Cleaning Fees
“We do want to make sure that people aren’t surprised, but what we don’t want to do is incentivize hosts to have a really low nightly rate and then have a high cleaning fee and then use that to appear cheap, and then progressively look more expensive,” Chesky said.
On Experiences and the Next $100 Billion Idea
Here Chesky drew an analogy to chatbots and ChatGPT.
“Do you remember the term chatbot? How it was like a phrase and just everything was gonna be a chatbot? And then it like never happened for six, five years. Never heard about chatbots. And then last November ChatGPT came out – that is a chatbot. And now, everybody knows this stuff.
You’re calling your chatbot – you’re calling it AI. But it’s a chatbot.
And so I feel like Experiences is a little bit like that. It is going to have this Cambrian explosion within travel. But we’re in the chatbot phase, not the chatGPT phase of experiences,” he said.
“I think there’s a $100 billion company that can be launched just doing experiences. I don’t think we’ve cracked it. I think we’ve created something special. But if we cracked it, it