Danielle Meredith/Airbnb
Airbnb’s Icons: Gimmick or Marketing Genius?
10.05.2024 - 21:29 / skift.com / Rashaad Jorden / Seth Borko / Sarah Kopit
Airbnb recently launched a new category of experiences and stays called Icons that aims to tap into the power of pop culture.
So what can travelers truly expect from Icons? How successful will it be? Skift Editor-in-Chief Sarah Kopit and Head of Research Seth Borko discussed Airbnb’s new product in this week’s Skift Travel Podcast.
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Sarah Kopit: It’s Airbnb’s reentry into the Experiences space after quietly pulling back on it some time ago. It started with the Barbie Dream house that Airbnb temporarily set up last summer. You probably saw that somewhere on your social media feeds or in the media. It was wildly successful. He talked about that a lot. And so Airbnb decided to double down with more houses designed to fuse light art and pop culture.
First, let’s listen to Chesky himself talk about it to set this up. He had just finished describing the popularity of the real life Barbie House. Here’s a clip:
…
Seth Borko: And that audience that he says he loves so much. You were a part of that audience, right, Sarah? He loves you.
Kopit: There you go. Yeah. So I was there. You know, it really was cool. We were talking about this before we started recording. I was a bit of a skeptic kind of going into it. I knew a little bit about what they were going to launch. But I don’t know … he really he sold me on it.
Like being there in that room. It really was impressive.
Borko: Do you think that he has … that was a straight Apple, Steve Jobs presentation. So yeah, just he had that reality distortion field where you fully bought into the Icons.
Kopit: I mean a little bit this podcast … I would recommend if you can go sit in front of a computer or just pull up some of the visuals that Airbnb has about it. This is going to be a very visual focused conversation because it’s hard to really describe what these Icons really are or why they’re cool — which is kind of why I think they’ve given the press on what we call embargo. Just the press release that they were going to put out about them before I went into that room.
So I knew that they were going to have this product called Icons, and it was going to be Experiences. And it’s a bit of a head scratcher. There were no pictures. And I was like, “What was it like, what is this? What are they going to be doing?” But not only did he go through the 11 icons on the video, he showed videos of them behind them on the big screen.
They actually had the house in … we were in a big movie studio lot. So they had the house. They actually brought it there to Los Angeles. And it was something. It was something how they did this. Because one of the things for the houses that they turned into is from
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