Airbnb says it wants to help travelers narrow down its more than 7 million listings.
To that end, the company Wednesday (Nov. 8) unveiled “Guest Favorites,” a collection of the 2 million best-reviewed homes on its rental platform.
“Guest Favorites have excellent reviews and are rated above 4.9 stars on average,” the company said on its website. “These homes also receive high marks for ease of check-in, cleanliness, listing accuracy, Host communication, location, and value.”
In addition, these properties have “superb” records of reliability, with an average of just 1% of host cancellations and quality-related customer service issues. They are also easy to find on Airbnb by looking for the “new” badge in search results or filtering for “Guest Favorites.”
Among the favorites listed by Airbnb are an apartment in the Brazilian rainforest, a Japanese country house, and a penthouse in Athens with a view of the Acropolis.
The launch of Guest Favorites comes one week after Airbnb’s most recent earnings call, where CEO Brian Chesky said the business has fully recovered to pre-COVID levels and will “continue growing supply by raising awareness around hosting, making it easier to get started and improving the overall experience for hosts.”
The company continues to explore the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance travel, with Chesky saying that digital businesses like Airbnb and online travel agencies are especially well-positioned to benefit from AI thanks to their inherently digital nature.
He added that AI can improve customer service, helping to mediate complex issues involving guests and hosts from different parts of the world.
“Imagine you have a Japanese hosting a German guest and there’s a problem and you have these two people speaking different languages calling customer service,” Chesky said. “There’s a myriad of issues. There’s no front desk. We can’t go on premise. We don’t understand the inventory and we need to try to adjudicate an issue based on 70 different policies that can be up to 100 pages long.”
With AI, however, “an agent can supervise a model that can, in seconds, come up with a better resolution and provide front desk level support in nearly every community in the world.”
Elsewhere in the travel sector, recent PYMNTS research finds that wealthier consumers use to find restaurants while traveling. Fifty-seven percent said that they use these tools while traveling, compared to 49% of the overall population.
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