When booking a trip, Airbnb offers the option for a room, an apartment or the whole home. Now, it’s becoming more than an eight-year-old rental platform.
The short-term rental business is expanding its options to become similar to a travel agency. Launching its new service, Trips, the platform provides private tours, localized activities and unique experiences.
And it’s not just one or two little excursions. Trips is debuting with 500 experiences — some lasting hours, others days — beginning in 12 of its already established cities.
Airbnb executives said the point is to help travelers get immersed in the local community. At the same time, the platform can create added revenue sources, especially in areas where renting is illegal, which is an issue the platform has recently had to deal with.
Depending on the local laws — county, state, federal — Airbnb has evolved its pricing to collect certain local hotel taxes to get along with regulators and legislators.
To date, the company lists around 3 million short-term rentals across 34,000 cities. And the “sharing economy” doesn’t seem to be going away. In fact, check out PYMNTS’ Uber of X weekly stories, highlighting other sharing economy businesses. According to Pew Research, 8 percent of American say they have made money through an online platform, such as Airbnb, Uber or a related business.
The Trips platform is intended to allow more people to make money through offering trips. Whether that’s less controversial than letting someone stay at your home, Airbnb says that, between the two platforms, that’s how engendering positive feelings toward the sharing economy could further evolve.
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