What's the reason that Airbnb Experiences never took off?
When Airbnb introduced Experiences - pivoting from being a marketplace of accomodations to accept all kinds of entertainment and activities, like boat trips, cooking courses, guided tours - I thought it would explode into commercialising whole ranges of human services, since these never had a good targeted platform before, these enterpreneurs promoted themselves mostly with social media pages and classical ads.
But the move did probably not work out - and as I see after the pandemic Airbnb tries to rather move into expensive/special/"crazy" accomodations instead. Do you have ideas what was the problem with this seemingly valid direction?
I personally didn't use it because whenever I looked on it the prices seemed a little on the high side.
I think it's a case of one app doing one thing though. When I go traveling maybe I look on trip advisor for good things to do, I don't want canned experiences. I would have been more likely to use it when I was living in NYC but it was too expensive anyway
One thing I remember from reading Kathy Sierra's excellent Creating Passionate Users guide from a long time ago is that trying to teach people what you offer and how your field works should be a big part of your marketing. Perhaps people didn't really get AirBnb experiences and they didn't teach it the right way?
I'm not an avid AirBnB user so I don't know exactly how they promoted it, but it sounds like an interesting idea that should take off.
I use Airbnb experiences on almost every trip to a new place, even when I’m not renting an Airbnb there, so not sure it failed.
What is the prompt for your post? I don't know how much it is used but I have personally used it once and I've never booked accommodation with AirBnB. The experience I did was fantastic.
What makes you think it didn't work out? Seems like they're still offering quite a few "experiences" on their website.
I've been doing AirBnB Experiences a lot and it seems to be rather popular. I don't really see how it didn't work out.
Personally I have almost always used AirBnB for business travel so I’ve never sought out ‘experiences’.