Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky had a problem that he wanted to solve.
When the company launched in 2008, it did so with a straightforward proposition: Rent your house, or a room in your house, to change how people travel the world.
But that was always a starting point.
“I remember thinking, I don’t think we have monetized people’s biggest asset, because I think people’s biggest asset is their time and their full earning potential,” Chesky recalls in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “We started thinking, what if you could Airbnb more than an Airbnb?”
The tech company on Tuesday is rolling out an enormous overhaul of its offering and app, adding services (think massages, personal training or meals) and experiences customized to each city or locale (i.e. a pastry-making class in Paris, a lucha libre experience in Mexico City or a gallery tour in New York).
“What if this time, instead of just getting like tour operators, we found some of the most interesting people in the world, from famous chefs, to sneaker designers, to musicians, to global celebrity icons?” Chesky says. “And what if we vetted all of them and made it easy to instantly book them. And what if these experiences became social, in the sense that you could see the other guests going, you could message them, you can keep in touch after, and what if everything was incredibly easy to book?”
So, his company is making it happen.
The result covers the basic to the extraordinary, with a wide range in between. On the celebrity front, Chesky says the company has “dozens” of high-profile people spanning music, sports and entertainment ready to participate. The initial batch of once-in-a-lifetime experiences will include days with the likes of Kansas City Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes playing football and eating barbecue; a day on the Short n’ Sweet set with Sabrina Carpenter; and a day with Megan Thee Stallion, with others rolling out over the coming weeks.
Chesky says the idea was inspired by last year’s launch of Airbnb Icons, in which the company made available a wide range of iconic locations (some real, some recreated from fiction) that its users could stay in. Some of those locations, like the X-Men Mansion in Westchester County New York, included an experiential element.
“We did a few homes where there was a celebrity at the home, and then at some point, we said wait, maybe we can just do celebrities without the home,” Chesky says, noting that as part of its new Airbnb Originals program, users will be able to book things like music lessons from up and coming musicians, or beach volleyball lessons with Olympic stars. “We had this basic idea that from an upcoming musician to Sabrina Carpenter and everything in between, that there was no gaps. Every stage of someone’s career, almost like as if Sabrina Carpenter was unknown, she could be on our platform, and as she becomes more popular, she can become an Original, and then eventually she becomes a superstar, and she still has a place in Airbnb. Why does she do it? She does it to create a one time experience for fans and really allow them to connect, and other fans can live vicariously through them.”
Of course, the celebrity experiences are a high-profile example of what the company has created, with experiences in some 650 cities set to be available at launch, covering art, culture, food, fitness, outdoors and just about everything in between.
Airbnb’s app design on experiences.
Courtesy of Airbnb
“We had to build a network of essentially, tastemakers, in cities all over the world that were highly networked, that came from these different communities,” Chesky says. “So we had chefs and we had musicians, and we had people in entertainment and sports in cities all over the world that were in our network, and they basically worked with us to find and recruit all these different hosts, and then we onboarded them.”
Airbnb is also building in social networking features based around these experiences, with plans to eventually bring back some of the magic of social media from the mid-aughts, when platforms like Facebook were about people you know in real-life, rather than algorithmically-driven videos and AI-generated content.
It’s all part of a wholesale rethink of the Airbnb platform, which Chesky frames as perhaps the biggest overhaul in the company’s history.
“We wanted to build a community in the real world where you can travel anywhere, live anywhere, and belong anywhere and so we needed the jumping off point to do that. I think experiences in particular are a way to do it,” Chesky says. “I wanted to be one of the companies that were getting people off their device into the real world, experiencing the magic of the world. And so that’s a little bit what we’re trying to do here.”
“We built these experiences for travelers. But I bet you a bunch of people in New York would love to go on experience on a Friday night,” he adds. “I think eventually a large percent of our business will probably be people using us in their own city.”
Chesky, widely regarded as one of Silicon Valley’s most forward-thinking entrepreneurs, paints a future of Airbnb that in many ways mirror the Silicon Valley of the not-so-distant past, when it felt like tech companies were connecting people around common interests, and spreading good vibes. When an Airbnb user books a group experience, the app will connect them with other people they, for example, took a cooking class with, letting users share photos of the experience or message each other. A social platform built around real-life, not videos of someone else’s life.
“When I came to Silicon Valley, the iPhone had just been announced, Facebook just opened from college students to everyone, and there were these things called social networks, and you could keep in touch with people. Kids aren’t using social networks today,” Chesky says, lamenting the algorithmic video feeds of Instagram and TikTok. “I always wondered, what if you could build the equivalent of a social network in the real world? Not in the digital world, because if it’s in the real world, then it’s not going to be this parasocial thing that’s ad-driven, it would be something totally different.”
And he thinks Airbnb can be a hub for that future network, one that can perhaps be something of a counterweight to the AI-generated revolution that is taking hold in Silicon Valley.
“I want the Airbnb profile to be most trusted profile on the internet. We verified 200 million identities. We now have these really interesting social features where you can connect with people,” Chesky says. “It’s like the early Facebook, except in the real world, and that was the whole idea behind it. Kids are spending more and more time on devices, and I want us to use technology to help get people off devices into the real world. Because AI is magical, but you know what’s more magical than AI? The real world, and people and relationships and memories.”