Airbnb Update Takes The Tourism Out Of Traveling

The traditional travel industry is still trying to catch up to the changes Airbnb precipitated when it exploded onto the scene, but the company’s latest update to its app might create even more dust for its competitors to eat.

Airbnb announced several tweaks to its room-booking process during a special event at its San Francisco headquarters Tuesday (April 19), with most focused around differentiating travel with Airbnb from the normal tedium of tourist activities, VentureBeat reported. Key to the pivot is a new algorithm that will match hosts’ neighborhoods with guests that profess similar lodging and travel preferences, as well as a guidebook feature that uses recommendations from those same in-the-know hosts — as opposed to the TripAdvisor model of sourcing experiences from tourists themselves — to peg off-the-beaten path points of interest for Airbnb lodgers.

It’s part of a re-positioning that CEO Brian Chesky told reporters is meant to bring guests’ experiences exploring unfamiliar cities in line with the familiar nature of staying in an Airbnb unit.

“Going is travel, but living is a deeper experience,” Chesky said during the event. “You stay in a hotel, but you live in a home. You tour a city center, but you live in a neighborhood. So we’re not really here to change travel, but to change the way you live through travel.”

The update also comes with a new guest-facing interface for the Airbnb app aimed at presenting a more intuitive search process for would-be lodgers. Guests are successively asked questions in a format that funnels their preferences, starting at location before moving through required sleeping spaces, types of housing and the features of a neighborhood they’d ideally like to stay in.

“Putting these questions up front is really new for us,” Amber Cartwright, a design manager at Airbnb told WIRED. “In our past experience they’ve been really hidden, and hard to find.”

If all goes according to plan, more transparent booking procedures will also uncover the hidden gems of traveling Airbnb’s users seek.