Ask HN: What's the reason that Airbnb Experiences never took off? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the reason that Airbnb Experiences never took off?

2 pointspoisonborz8 comments

When Airbnb introduced Experiences - pivoting from being a marketplace of accomodations to accept all kinds of entertainment and activities, like boat trips, cooking courses, guided tours - I thought it would explode into commercialising whole ranges of human services, since these never had a good targeted platform before, these enterpreneurs promoted themselves mostly with social media pages and classical ads.

But the move did probably not work out - and as I see after the pandemic Airbnb tries to rather move into expensive/special/"crazy" accomodations instead. Do you have ideas what was the problem with this seemingly valid direction?

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I personally didn't use it because whenever I looked on it the prices seemed a little on the high side.

I think it's a case of one app doing one thing though. When I go traveling maybe I look on trip advisor for good things to do, I don't want canned experiences. I would have been more likely to use it when I was living in NYC but it was too expensive anyway

One thing I remember from reading Kathy Sierra's excellent Creating Passionate Users guide from a long time ago is that trying to teach people what you offer and how your field works should be a big part of your marketing. Perhaps people didn't really get AirBnb experiences and they didn't teach it the right way?

I'm not an avid AirBnB user so I don't know exactly how they promoted it, but it sounds like an interesting idea that should take off.

I use Airbnb experiences on almost every trip to a new place, even when I’m not renting an Airbnb there, so not sure it failed.

What is the prompt for your post? I don't know how much it is used but I have personally used it once and I've never booked accommodation with AirBnB. The experience I did was fantastic.

What makes you think it didn't work out? Seems like they're still offering quite a few "experiences" on their website.

I've been doing AirBnB Experiences a lot and it seems to be rather popular. I don't really see how it didn't work out.

Maybe it would be more clear question like "why it didn't explode". It doesn't seem to be going well enough for it to be the main driver of Airbnb anymore, even though it was seemingly created to be "the" big differentiator to competitors.

Personally I have almost always used AirBnB for business travel so I’ve never sought out ‘experiences’.

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