Airbnb's Brian Chesky debuting the new app on stage. (Photo: Airbnb)
Tuesday morning at Airbnb's San Francisco headquarters, cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky stood on stage in front of a fake living room set to announce an app re-design.
While the new features Chesky announced were relatively minor--neighborhood guidebooks and a slicker, more customizable search interface--they hinted at Airbnb's broader plans. Make no mistake, this $25 billion-valued startup has its sights set on much more than the hotel industry: it wants to own the entire local experience of travel.
Chesky spent part of his 20 minute presentation showing a slideshow of his parents' recent trip to Paris. With Chesky's mother laughing loudly in the front row, he openly mocked their choices of touristy sight-seeing destinations and eateries (including American fast food chain Subway). Airbnb's new features, like guidebooks on 25 cities that, at launch, include 3.5 million local recommendations, are aimed in the short term to fix this common problem of mass tourism.
Yet in the long term Airbnb clearly hopes to become the center of your travel experience, a resource and relationship much deeper than its current book-and-forget Expedia-like use case. Surfacing local recommendations and creating its own guidebooks for local destinations could attract the growing number of Airbnb tourists (15 million guests since the beginning of the year) to use the app on the ground to find attractions, restaurants, and more. That also could take a bite out of the businesses of websites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Google Maps.
Airbnb's new in-app guidebooks to local neighborhoods. (Photo: Airbnb)
On stage, Chesky highlighted how Airbnb's top five recommendations for places to visit in Paris were different from TripAdvisor's popular wisdom. His argument was that Airbnb hosts find better, more off-the-beaten path local destinations for travelers who want to avoid the crowds. And that's summarized in the company's new ad campaign, "Don't Go There. Live there."
But ultimately it's not about better recommendations--it's about taking Airbnb's growing heft in the hospitality business and leveraging it to expand into other parts of travel, all of which could potentially be lucrative side businesses, like local advertising or payments (think: purchasing tickets for concerts, making restaurant reservations, or skipping the line at a museum).
At the end of his presentation, Chesky teased "Open Los Angeles," a new unknown project coming in November. He asked, "What if Airbnb did go beyond the home?" Sounds like it already is.
