Airbnb expands into services and experiences, plans more social and AI features
As part of a broader app update, Airbnb on Tuesday introduced a new feature that allows travelers to book services and experiences, like getting a massage, haircut, or chef-prepared meal, or taking part in some activity. These new offerings can be added to your stay, but they can also be booked independently, Airbnb says.
For instance, you can book a tour in a city you’ve traveled to, but where you’ve chosen to stay elsewhere, the company suggests.
This is not the first time Airbnb has tried such a feature — it paused an earlier version of experiences in 2023 to improve its core offering of stays. Now the company once again wants customers to go beyond planning a trip.
The move is meant to capitalize on the traffic Airbnb’s site already receives. During Airbnb’s Q1 2025 call, CEO Brian Chesky said that its service was accessed by over 1.5 billion devices in the last year, but pointed out that many people come to the site and don’t book a home.
It also brings Airbnb more directly in competition with other travel companies such as Tripadvisor, Booking.com, Viator, and GetYourGuide, and service providers like Yelp.
Initially, Airbnb allows you to book services across 10 categories, including chefs, catering, prepared meals, photography, massages, spa treatment, personal training, hair, nails, and makeup. The services will be offered in 100 cities worldwide across eight countries.
While users can take advantage of services where they’re staying, they will typically have to travel to a venue for the experiences.
Initially, experiences will include cultural and museum tours; outdoor, watersport, and wildlife experiences; food tours and cooking classes; art workshops and shopping experiences; and workout, wellness, and beauty experiences. The company is launching experiences in 19 categories across 1,000 cities in the world.
Airbnb is also launching exclusive experiences on its platform called Airbnb Originals, which involve celebrity partnerships. These include things like pastry making at French Bastards bakery with chef Raphaelle Elbaz, or playing beach volleyball with Olympian Carol Solberg on Rio’s Leblon Beach.
“These experiences and services are a way to experience a city like a local. We think that these are natural extensions to home [stays]. What’s great about Airbnb is that you get unique accommodations that you can’t find anywhere else. We think about our new offerings the same way,” Judson Coplan, VP of Product Marketing at Airbnb, told TechCrunch over a call.
Coplan believes that Airbnb Experiences may inspire people to travel and take a trip they might not have thought about. Plus, he thinks that the new offerings can lead to people discovering new things to do in their own town.
Airbnb will take a 15% cut from services and a 20% cut from experiences. However, users will just see one price when searching for or booking either category. The company says hosts in these categories will go through verification and quality checks that include their experience, online presence, education, and required licenses.
Airbnb’s new app adds a social play
The addition of services and experiences is part of a larger app update where both the apps for guests and hosts will be revamped to accommodate the new categories, among other changes.
Guests will be able to explore and book from the Stay, Services, and Experiences categories. And, if travelers already have an upcoming trip booked, the app will suggest related experiences or services. On the other end, hosts will have a calendar and listings functions that help them manage bookings and offerings.
Airbnb is also preparing to roll out social features later this year.
The app today has a group messaging feature for trip planning, but it plans to add a group chat feature for people who have been to an experience together. That way, they can talk about the experience, share photos and videos, or make recommendations for another trip.
In turn, Airbnb hopes this could lead people to want to travel more and use its platform to do so.
The company says it’s developing privacy features around these social connections to create a safe experience for users.
The social features follow last year’s launch of an updated profile page, which allowed users to describe more about themselves, including where they live, languages they speak, and other facts about themselves.
Coplan said that after that release, the number of completed profiles on the platform increased by 15x.
“There was a huge increase in a number of people who wanted to share more about themselves. For us, that was a clue that travel is something about connections,” he explained. “Whether it’s your host, people you travel with, or people you meet along the way. There is especially, in this moment of time, a desire to connect with other people.”
Scaling customer service with AI
Mirroring comments made by Chesky, Coplan noted how Airbnb is using AI to provide customer service, and how, over time, its AI assistant will become a concierge that can handle trip planning and inspiration.
Earlier this month, Chesky introduced Airbnb’s AI-powered customer service agent. Unlike the previous version of the bot, which redirected users to a support article, the assistant now provides an answer within the chat.
The bot is initially available to English-speaking users in the U.S. and will be fully rolled out by month-end to this market. Later this year, the feature will become available to more countries and languages, Coplan told TechCrunch.
Over time, he says Airbnb will add more features to its AI assistant, including personalized answers tailored to your trip and booking, and in-line action buttons for taking quick actions, such as canceling a booking.
The updated Airbnb website and iOS and Android apps are rolling out to all users globally starting today.
