Airbnb Experiences

Launching and scaling Airbnb Experiences

In 2017, I joined a small incubation team working directly with the CEO, VP of Design, and VP of Product to define, launch, and scale Airbnb Experiences.

Phase I

Defining the north star

Role: Design Lead

In 2015, the year I joined Airbnb, I took my father to Europe in hopes of inspiring him to retire from his thankless job and pursue what he was passionate about: World War II history. Our itinerary wasn't just packed with museums, battlegrounds, and other sites. Through Airbnb (and many hours of research), I was able to find homes along our route that were gateways into the past. One listing we stayed in was the home of a war hero that still bore holes in its cement floors from aerial artillery. Another host we stayed with, a local history scholar, sparked enlightening conversations well into the night. These stays reaffirmed my belief in Airbnb's ability to enrich travel through unmatched, authentic local connection.

A year later, I was given the opportunity to join the Magical Trips Team, a small incubation project with an ambitious vision to provide guests with personal transformation through travel experiences. Immediately reminded of the trip I created for my father, I jumped at the opportunity without hesitation.

My first few days on the team were spent peaking behind the curtain and getting caught up to speed on all of the research that had been done over the past year. Research participants were given an all-expenses-paid trip from Airbnb in exchange for a few interviews to help our team understand what made their trip magical and where they weren't so magical. Participants were interviewed before their trip to understand their personalities and passions, trips were hand-crafted by our operations team, then participants were interviewed afterwards to better understand

Phase II

Launching the first 100 experiences

Role: Design Lead

The second phase of this project was all about execution and go-to-market. Our team shared a clear understanding of our vision, and now was the time to start bringing that vision to life. The goal of this phase was to unveil a brand new version of Airbnb to the world at a launch event in Los Angeles only 6 months away. In this phase, I collaborated with other designers and company leadership to re-design the Airbnb search experience and create the initial foundation of the supply side of the marketplace.

Re-imagining search

Up until this point, Airbnb had spent nearly a decade perfecting its core search experience. Through countless iterations, it crafted an efficient and delightful way to find the perfect home for your trip. However, it did not provide guests a way to discover and book things to do in addition to places to stay. The goal of this project was to craft a new search experience that struck the right balance of introducing our new Experiences products without compromising core business metrics. For this project, I had the pleasure of collaborating with world class designer, Dave Muro. Our design process included daily design reviews with the CEO, Brian Chesky, and VP of Design, Alex Schleiffer.

Concept I: Create Trip

As Airbnb started to shift from "homes" to "the entire trip," we wanted to explore a concept that really leaned into this new frame of mind. Users were already accustomed to finding inventory via a typical search bar and narrowing their results using filters. We didn't want to eliminate this pattern entirely. However, in addition to the "search" entry point, we also explored a new entry point to "Create trip." The label of the entry point immediately changes your mental model from looking for a home to thinking about building an end-to-end trip.

Concept II: Expanding on traditional search

The second direction expanded on the product's existing mental model of finding inventory on Airbnb. It consisted of using the search bar as the primary call to action in the experience, an interaction to expand the search bar into the primary search criteria, and horizontal tabbed categorization of inventory for quick filtering to the different verticals Airbnb now offered. As the user tabbed from category to category, content in the app would update to reflect that selection.

Evaluating the two directions

Evaluating these two directions was difficult. Concept I offered a very novel way to encourage the desired "end-to-end trip" mental model we were after. We also liked this direction because it challenged existing industry norms and could set us apart as unique — something Airbnb was accustomed to doing. However, we also hypothesized that introducing too many changes to the product and its offerings all at once could be detrimental to core business metrics. Without sufficient time to build both directions and measure their performance, we elected to pursue Direction 2 and keep Direction 1 in our back pockets.

Piecing together the end-to-end vision

We worked with our internal videography team to assemble a showreel for our public launch that strung together all of the various pieces of our end-to-end vision: Homes, Experiences, Places, a new search experience, and a hint of what was yet to come.

Phase III

Scaling to 30,000 experiences

Role: Design Lead and Manager, Host Product

Our launch goals centered around generating excitement for the new Airbnb. Specifically for Experiences, there was an intense focus on quality over quantity in order to showcase what made Airbnb Experiences uniquely different from normal tours and activities. However, in this next phase, our goals were all about scale and how to scale in a way that preserved the quality we launched with. How might we scale from 100 Experiences in 12 cities to over 50,000 Experiences all over the world? And how might we do this while not sacrificing an average review score of 4.9 stars? My role in this phase was as a Design Lead and Manager for the Supply Side of the Experiences marketplace. I was responsible for collaborating with cross-functional stakeholders in driving design strategy for Host Acquisition, Host Tools and Success, managing a small team of designers, and also doing IC design work as a player/coach.

Designing an acquisition engine

Before crafting a vision for where we were going, we needed to asses our current situation. In examining our current host acquisition funnel, the process to get to our first 100 Experiences took, on average, 60 days and $13,000 from finding the right hosts, helping them craft their idea into a bookable Experience, and putting together their video and photo merchandising.

Problem

It was clear after analyzing our funnel that our existing process from submission to bookable Experience was too manual and too inefficient, resulting in high costs and frustrated hosts.

Business goals

Our primary goal was to scale our supply from 100 Experiences in 12 cities to 30,000 Experiences globally without compromising quality. In order to do that, we kept a close eye several key metrics, including:

  • Experience submission rate

  • Submit-to-publish rate

  • Median time to vet an experience

  • Median time to merchandise an experience

  • Median cost to merchandise an experience

  • Median time to publish

  • Median time to bookable availability

Design goals

With business and user needs in mind, we agreed upon a set of principles that would guide us towards a long-term North Star which we believed would enable us to scale our supply while preserving quality, uniqueness, and brand expression:

  • Flexible

  • Targeted

  • All stakeholders in mind

  • Keep experiences weird

Acquisition Engine v1: A foundation to build on

After conducting interviews with our operations and vetting team, we learned that the key reason why the vetting process took so long was that they had to go back and forth with the host to understand the ins-and-outs of their experience. So we hypothesized that a more comprehensive submission flow for hosts would help give a clearer signal to our operations team on whether or not the Experience should be published in our managed marketplace. We believed the more we could educate hosts on what we were looking for, the more efficient the funnel would be.

So we designed a host acquisition experience that aimed to accomplish a few key things:

  • Show, don't tell hosts what a high quality experience looks like

  • Allow hosts to "build" their experience submission instead of writing a description of it

  • Provide guidance and education along the way

  • Yield a submission that helped our vetting team understand the host's vision earlier

However, the more we experimented with various iterations of the submission flow, the more we could understand the trade-offs of our design decisions. Flows with less guidance and education were easier to complete, increasing the submission rate and number of experiences submitted for vetting. However, these low-friction flows did not yield high quality submissions that clearly articulated to our vetting team whether or not they addressed our quality standards, resulting in a lot of operational cost. Ultimately, it was about assessing the needs of each market to find the right amount of friction to yield the results we needed. New markets that needed supply utilized low-friction host submission flows, whereas more mature markets that needed specific types of experiences employed higher-friction submission flows that yielded higher quality submissions.

Acquisition Engine v2: Targeted education

With a product foundation now in place, we could start layering in principles from our initial design vision: flexible and targeted. Instead of the host onboarding experience being one-size-fits-all, we could now start to layer on education and guidance that was tailored to a host's experience level, the market they were looking to host in, and the type of experience they wanted to host. This resulted in higher quality submissions for our operations team to vet, as well as more structured data to allow them to build their supply mix.

Internal tools

Up until this point, our internal operations team was solely reliant on Salesforce for its CRM. After evaluating our team needs and Salesforce's capabilities, it was clear that our acquisition process could become significantly more efficient with tools fit-for-purpose to our specific needs. So, I facilitated a one-week design and engineering sprint with our local operations teams in our key markets to understand their process, pain points, and needs, and co-designed a new set of tools with them to provide a much-needed boost to their daily tasks.

Tools to empower host success

In addition to products to improve our supply acquisition, the team I managed was also responsible for tools to support host success after their experience was published. This work included tools for hosts to merchandise their experience page, set and manage their calendar and availability, price their experience competitively, and manage guest correspondence with messaging.

Assessing impact

All of our efforts to productize our acquisition funnel resulted in significantly improved acquisition metrics. Our funnel was significantly more efficient, more cost effective, and relied less and less on human intervention. Additionally, we built a foundation of tools to help hosts find success in the experiences they brought to life on our platform. However, the more we saw improvements to our scale goals, the more it felt like quality was being overlooked. It felt like the right time to take a step back, zoom out, and assess our impact.

The "Paella Problem"

It was clear after analyzing our funnel that our existing process from submission to bookable Experience was too manual and too inefficient, resulting in high costs and frustrated hosts.

Charlie Aufmann