Airbnb’s holiday boost: Introduces new features to enhance user experience

Airbnb, the online marketplace for homestays, has introduced new features before the holiday season. These include guest favourites, revamped reviews and ratings, and listings tab, which the company believes will help guests understand exactly what to expect before they book.

Amanpreet Bajaj, General Manager, Airbnb India, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan, told Business Today, “We have more than 7 million one-of-a-kind listings on Airbnb across the world. And when guests have such a huge variety of listings to choose from, the diversity and variety kind of set us apart. Unlike hotels, at times, it can be hard for guests to kind of understand what to expect. And so, what we have announced with our features will be able to fix this going forward.”

Bajaj explains that the new feature Guest Favourites is a collection of the 2 million most loved homes on Airbnb. This is based on ratings, reviews, and reliability data from almost half a billion trips that Airbnb analysed using technology. These also have excellent reviews and are rated above 4.9 stars on a scale of five stars. “Guest Favourites is a unique way and also an amazing way for guests to discover the best places they want to stay based on past data around ratings, reviews, and reliability.”

Bajaj states that Airbnb users have left over 371 million reviews about their stays on Airbnb globally, and ratings and reviews are the best way for guests to understand the quality of a home in terms of what experience others have had when they booked a similar home in the past. Given that very little information on the ratings page was available, it was hard for guests to find reviews that were relevant to them. To make these reviews easier to read and helpful, Airbnb has introduced sorting the reviews based on recency, or rating. It also introduced a new visual chart that shows the distribution of reviews from one to five stars. “Basically, what we've done is we've looked at all the inputs from the guest and host communities and incorporated them to revamp reviews and ratings.”

Bajaj hopes these features will make it much easier for guests who have never used Airbnb to book their first stay on the platform going forward.

In addition to the updates for guests, Airbnb has introduced new features for hosts as well to help them manage their listing and showcase the details guests care about most, including an AI-powered photo tour, price comparison, and more. Airbnb’s AI-powered tool instantly organises the photos by the rooms when a host uploads more than 20 images. Hosts will also have the ability to compare their prices to those of similar listings, making it easy to track local pricing trends. There is also a completely redesigned dashboard for hosts to have a clear view of their earnings, including a detailed breakdown of past and future payments, customizable reports, filters, and search.

While Bajaj did not reveal India’s contribution to global revenue or the number of hosts in the country, Airbnb supported over 85,000 jobs and contributed over $920 million to India's GDP between April 2022 and March 2023, according to Oxford Economics data. In addition, for every $100 spent outside of accommodation, Airbnb guests spend $49 in local communities (restaurants, retail, entertainment, and shopping). The remaining $51 is allocated to transport.

Also, in Asia Pacific, Airbnb’s business has fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels, with gross nights growing 23% in Q3 2023 compared to Q3 2019.

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