‘Loneliness is actually a really big epidemic,’ Susan Wheeldon recently announced to a gathered audience of creative entrepreneurs and technologists, in Sydney. ‘The UK actually has just announced its first ever Minister for Loneliness,’ she continued.
Over COVID we heard a lot about the ability for arts and culture to keep people connected, despite lockdowns. Wheeldon, who is a Director at Airbnb, says our ‘neediness’ for connection, however, is not exclusive to a pandemic, and post-pandemic, psyche.
‘Globally, our overarching mission is for anyone to belong anywhere. And a way for that to happen, is for humans to connect with other humans.’ She was talking about Airbnb Experiences, and a range of other new offerings in the self-managed tourism industry.
‘We’re always looking how we can find ways for people to really connect with each other, and our experience product is designed to do that,’ she added.
Wheeldon said that while connection first started through private home experiences, it has developed into a much more nuanced offering through the way people book and plan travel today.
‘When we talk about experiences, 40% of the people who come to Airbnb don’t know where they want to go, or when they want to go,’ Wheeldon said. ‘It is very hard to build AI around that. And what we realised is that, while you don’t know where you want to go, you kind of know you want to go to the beach or get away from it off the grid, or you may want to go somewhere that is totally crazy. And that’s very developer friendly. So we built something called Categories.
‘We have had two billion views through that product since it was launched less than two years ago,’ added Wheeldon.
Categories, in many ways, is the next generation of ‘experiences’ with the global company.
Human connection is driving tourism today
Airbnb Experiences was launched in 2016, with an ‘experience’ described as anything from a cooking class to a studio visit to a street art guided tour, but it had to be local and it had to be unique. It was perfect for creatives.
During COVID, Online Experiences was launched. ‘We built our online experience product in 72 hours; we had to contact every single host around the world and ask them if they could take their existing experience and turn it into an online experience,’ said Wheeldon.
She spoke of a nonna in a small Italian town making pasta with her granddaughters making US$250,000 in the first three months. ‘There was another one in New Zealand where you just watch a farmer – it was one of the most popular in the world. And the most popular for Australians was learning to meditate with a Japanese Buddhist monk,’ she continued.
The New York Times spent a weekend bingeing on Airbnb’s Online Experiences, and delivered the verdict: ‘So how close can a video chat come to taking you into a new place or culture? As it turns out, very close. As page after page of five-star reviews make clear, you really do meet new people in new places; you genuinely do lose yourself in another world. This new format is an ingenious, inexpensive way to carry you and your family away during lockdown, and even – why not? – long after the present plague passes.’
The future of the experience
With people searching less by dates or destinations, and more by experiences, the landscape is shifting quickly in online tourism.
Airbnb reports that a typical US home host in 2022 earned $14,000 (about AU$20,000). In the current model, hosts who want to take part in the Experiences program pay 20% of the final price as a commission fee to Airbnb.
Good money, so how can creatives better capture that opportunity for revenue, and where does the future of Airbnb Experiences now sit in trends and development?
Early last year, Airbnb announced it would pause new host sign-ups to its Airbnb Experiences, with the offering being ghosted from the search toolbar. It still exists, but requires the user to actively seek it out.
The company offered the statement at the time: ‘As part of our focus on perfecting the core service, including Airbnb Experiences, we are pausing submissions of all new Experiences,’ adding, ‘we are excited about the future of Airbnb Experiences and expect to provide more information in the coming months.’
That information has not as yet been released, and speaking at REMIX Summit in Sydney this month, Wheeldon offered no update, other than touting the success of its online pandemic offering and the success of connection-driven tourism.
‘Airbnb Experiences is a “big area” of investment in the coming years,’ said CEO Brian Chesky (May 2022), ‘with it being ramped up again in 2022 and “even more” in 2023.’
According to Chesky, the Experience platform grew 12 times in size from January to October 2017 – about 13 times faster than the Airbnb rental property business did at the same time. Phocus Wire reported that the Experiences program made the company US$1 billion in the second quarter of 2019. So clearly, there is evidence for its continuation.
Speculation around the pause, rather, has been directed more towards how Experience bookings are managed through Airbnb, rather than its dwindling interest, with the current pause perhaps being related to technology solutions.
What is sure, is that the highly curated travel experience is the future, and culture plays a big part of that. Wheeldon also added that the company has recently been laying out a Reconciliation Action Plan, and better accessibility platforms for both home and experience bookings. She explained: ‘That’s not just about recognising, obviously, custodial owners and working with them, but it’s also about saying there’s so much cultural heritage and history that we don’t know about – and there’s also a huge demand for that internationally.
‘So we’re looking at how we can partner to provide some of those experiences, so that we can share that knowledge to the point where people feel like they’re meaningfully connected with where they’re going and understanding the history of the land that they’re on,’ she concluded.
Clearly, it is a ‘watch this space’ scenario. And … get yourself ready to tap the opportunity.
This article is drawn in part from a presentation Susan Wheeldon delivered at the REMIX Summit, Sydney, June 2023.
REMIX is yet to announced its next date for its London Summit.
