Airbnb has gathered accolades in short term rentals and is in no mood to stop exploring the horizon. It raves about guest experiences it offers beyond the bland stay at the forgettable hotel room. The consumers are super excited about the company rolling out its testing phase of an entirely new experience. This is more or less similar to getting guided tours except that the host gets to be the guide here.
Airbnb has launched the new program called the City Hosts which allows the tenants to experience a new side of being in the city. The program has been launched in private beta mode and currently allows major towns like San Francisco, Tokyo, Paris, London and Los Angeles to be on the platform.
This program gives the user an ability to customise their own experiences in an entirely personal format which looks super fresh move in terms of exploring new things for the company. There are currently 36 experiences available which sound ecstatically awesome such as; adventures with a kite surfer in SF, Vietnamese cooking lessons with a Parisian chef and tours through London’s Grime music scene with a record scout. The experience could be entirely exclusive or shared depending on the number of guests the host has taken. The experiences are charged per guest where the tenant would pay up if he chooses to stay in the City Host specific city.
For instance; if someone wants to explore, let’s say, party culture in Tokyo, all they have to do is find a City Host experience that says Party Animal and pays $250 per guest and as it turns out Ken would host you to amazing bar crawls and clubbing options. Usually, the guests get to spend about 3 hours a day for the entire stay time, hence getting a local like feel to the place of stay.
This initiative gives guests a more activity-focused way to select when and where they travel. After booking an experience, the site could list down few options where one can possibly stay close to where they’ve booked heir entertainment options. The site had come up with a Guidebooks option with their oh so lovely Live There campaign until recently. Such interesting gradual steps are a surer way for the company to increase its scalability in the minds of the consumers.
The experience handling is a new way in for the company and it surely has its own set of queries. Would hosts be open to such kind of model? This program is in its incredibly early stages and it’s highly uncertain what the fate would hold.
Source: Techcrunch
