Last November, we reported on how Airbnb appeared to be experimenting with ways to expand beyond its role as a P2P marketplace for renting private accommodation, to “experiences” — including more detailed local guides and a prepaid card to spend money once you’re there. Now, as Airbnb continues to expand, covering some 34,000 cities and 2 million properties, it is coming good on some of this.
In a new app update today, Airbnb is launching a series of local Guidebooks collating tips written up by local hosts and power users, and it is debuting a new system and algorithm to help learn about what you like to better match you with both homes and specific neighborhoods.
The Guidebooks will start with 3 million tips from 35 cities, while Neighborhood Matching initially will cover 23 of Airbnb’s most popular cities: Austin, Bangkok, Barcelona, Berlin, Boston, Buenos Aires, Lake Tahoe, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Mexico City, Miami, New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro (pictured above), Rome, San Francisco, Seoul, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Venice, and Washington DC. Airbnb is formally announcing the services at an event in San Francisco (and we’ll update this post with more detail as we learn it).
Part of the reasoning both for offering more tips on places, and suggesting various neighborhoods to people, is that Airbnb wants to make sure that as its platform grows, the long tail of inventory it has on its platform doesn’t sit idle while would-be guests turn away when they balk at the prices for homes in prime locations, or simply find everything in those choice areas to be sold out. Some three-fourths of all inventory on the app already is outside of city center districts.
Airbnb is spinning this somewhat differently, and if you give them the benefit of the doubt, there is something […]
