Airbnb Experiences

The Bet

In 2013, I was working at Airbnb on the trust and safety team when Joe Gebbia recruited me to join a small team with a specific mandate: extend the Airbnb model beyond the home.

The idea wasn’t new to Airbnb. The company had tried variations of it twice before. A partnership with Vayable in 2011 to surface local activities didn’t take hold. A first-party attempt the following year didn’t either. What the company was trying to figure out was whether Airbnb hosts could offer more than a place to sleep — whether the trust infrastructure, the payment rails, the review system, and the community could support an entirely new category of offering.

The context mattered. Brian Chesky had just reframed the entire company around belonging. The brand was being redesigned. The mission had shifted from “rent a room” to something considerably more ambitious. Experiences wasn’t just a product bet. It was a test of whether the company’s emerging identity could hold more than accommodation.

Chip Conley, who had joined as Head of Global Hospitality, was the executive sponsor. He was the first person in the company who came from the hospitality industry. His presence gave the project both legitimacy and urgency.

What We Learned

Our team was small and research-driven in an environment that wasn’t always either.

I partnered with Katherine Chen, our research lead, to design and run the qualitative work that would ground the product. We interviewed fifteen people from across the Airbnb community, hosts and guests alike, to understand what hosts already wanted to offer and what guests were actually looking for.

What we found was simple: demand already existed on both sides, and it was closer than anyone inside the company had acknowledged. Hosts were already interested in sharing more than their homes, and guests were willing to pay for experiences led by local people, often preferring an Airbnb host over a third-party operator if given the option.

Two things stood out. The existing trust platform was a structural advantage no external competitor could replicate. And the category was wide open — nobody had yet built a scalable marketplace for local, host-led experiences.

The more important learning came during the pilot itself. We worked directly with experience providers in San Francisco and Paris, hands-on and in the field, debriefing in near real time and folding what we learned into the next iteration.

What emerged was a clear pattern: the more concrete and specific an experience, the better it converted. Structured, skill-based offerings found an audience. Open-ended experiences that felt more like casual hangs worked for some users but didn’t attract broad demand. That distinction shaped how we thought about onboarding providers, how we described experiences to guests, and ultimately what we built.

What We Built

The pilot gave us enough signal to start building in earnest.

I owned the end-to-end design: the experience provider onboarding flow, the discovery and booking surfaces on web and mobile, and the guest-facing experience before and after the activity. The work extended Airbnb’s existing design language, which had recently been overhauled by Design Studio, while introducing new patterns for a service category the platform had never supported before.

The core design challenge was trust transfer. Airbnb had spent years building host credibility around a specific set of signals: photography, reviews, verified identity, responsiveness. Those signals worked because the product was simple — you were booking a place to stay. Experiences were different. A kayaking trip is not an apartment. We had to figure out which trust signals actually mattered in this new context, and how to surface them without making the experience feel like a different product.

Discovery was its own problem. Guests booking accommodation weren’t necessarily in the mindset to also book a cooking class. Timing, framing, and placement all mattered. We tested extensively during the pilot and used what we learned to inform the final design.

Outcomes

The pilot worked. The product shipped. And Airbnb Experiences is still live today.

What started as a quiet experiment in two cities, with a handpicked group of providers and no public announcement, eventually became a formal product launch in 2016. By 2017, more than 3,000 experiences were available across 40 cities. By 2018, bookings had grown nearly seven times year over year.

Today, the category operates in hundreds of markets around the world. I can’t claim credit for everything that came after — the product was built on and extended by teams I wasn’t part of. But the pilot established that the model worked, defined the core experience patterns, and gave the company enough confidence to invest.

What we learned in San Francisco and Paris became the foundation for what Experiences eventually became.