Excerpt from Tech Crunch
Last year, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said that the single-biggest challenge for the company was thinking like a startup, despite Airbnb’s tremendous growth over the last decade. The pandemic, he said, spurred the need to simplify and focus to survive. Since, Airbnb has put out hundreds of new features.
Today, that continues with Airbnb’s latest feature updates. The biggest changes include a new search based on category, the ability to book two listings in one flow for stays over a week and AirCover for guests, which is basically Airbnb-provided travel insurance.
The updates work toward two big goals for the company.
The first is to inspire the world to get back to travel. Chesky believes that a new era of travel is about to begin and Airbnb is leaning into that. Hard. By reinventing search, automatically stringing together listings for longer-term travel (which is growing increasingly popular) and by protecting users under AirCover, Airbnb is opening the door for guests looking to get back out there in a safe way.
“We think people are ready to dream again,” said Chesky. “A lot of people have been sequestered at home for two years. Many people haven’t taken that big trip for the first time. And so we want to encourage people to get out of their house and venture this big world.”
The second goal is more around the health of the business. Airbnb lives and dies by its individual hosts. Small operations with one, or maybe a few, properties. Category search and split stays gives hosts from all corners of the platform better visibility, whether or not they meet the exact specifications of a user’s search.
Airbnb categories
Continuing in the vein of flexible search, Airbnb is today releasing a new way to search by categories. In fact, the home page now just launches into a search for one week, with flexible dates, and shows a scrolling bar at the top of Airbnb’s new categories, rather than the OG search bar that asks “Where are you going?”
The new search includes type of home (such as A-frames, cabins, castles and tiny homes), as well as in-home features (amazing pools, chef’s kitchens and creative spaces), location type (arctic, beach, farm) and even activity (surfing, golfing, ski-in/ski-out).
Since the start of the pandemic, Airbnb has been focused on flexibility for guests. But the business benefits are crystal clear. If users are searching for the same general tourism destinations, and they have to search by some random hard-and-fast dates, their inventory options will be severely limited.
Airbnb has hosts in hundreds of thousands of cities across the globe, and flexible search allows for these locations to be discovered.
The company first fiddled with flexible search back in February of 2021, offering users the chance to search by length of stay (weekend getaway, week-long vacation, month-long vacation and so on) without setting specific dates.
In May that year, Airbnb announced it would add flexible matching and flexible destinations. Flexible Matching doesn’t lock users in to every single search criteria that they select, but shows Airbnbs that have most of the criteria covered, while Flexible Destinations marked the origin of today’s categories announcement, allowing users to search for beach-side properties or treehouses.
This ramping up of flexible search crescendos into today’s release, which puts categories front and center.
What’s more, Airbnb is using a combination of machine learning and manual review to organize listings using structured data. For example, listings in the “Design” category either show the architect or the publication in which the property was featured as a “title.” Listings in the “Shared Home” category show the host’s name as the title, as that’s likely the more important piece of information a user would need based on the category.
The same strategy is used for the featured image on listings — for example, the first picture you’ll see after searching in the pool category is, of course, the pool.
This means that listing titles and descriptions have become far less significant, giving individual hosts a better chance at competing on the merit of their property, rather than their marketing prowess.
Category search also works alongside destination search and flexes based on the location. For example, if you’re searching for places in France, categories like “Historic Homes” or “Vineyards” will pop up.
Airbnb split stays
Airbnb is also introducing split stays. The company’s research shows that long-term stays are at an all-time high, more than doubling from two years ago. To help accommodate this demand, Airbnb split stays allow users to book, let’s say, a two-week trip and stay in two different listings, just in case neither of those listings are available for the full two weeks.
Split stays are available across 14 of Airbnb’s new categories, as well as for specific destination searches. When selected, the UI shows the distance between the two listings and sets up an easy flow for guests to book both different listings without loads of tabs open.
Split stays are shown on all searches that are a week or longer.
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