| Hi everyone, it's Natalie in New York. Airbnb plans to offer travelers a lot more for their vacations than just a place to sleep. But first... Three things you need to know today: • Bitcoin's boom is validating Wall Streeters who jumped into crypto
• Alibaba and E-Mart agreed to form an e-commerce joint venture in South Korea
• Lyft accused San Francisco of overcharging the company $100 million in taxes In 2025, we will all live like royalty at a stranger's flat thanks to Airbnb Inc.'s new luxury offerings. Think fridge restocking, mid-week cleaning and transportation to and from the airport — amenities that travelers have come to expect from a hotel stay, but not so much from someone's guest house. These are among the features of a new guest service marketplace that Airbnb has teased for its big push beyond accommodations in 2025, according to interviews with company executives in the past year. Combined with the May relaunch of its travel activities product, Experiences, the new business lines will help add $1 billion or more in revenue a year, Airbnb Chief Executive Officer Brian Chesky has said. But why is Airbnb doing this now, eight years after it first ventured into areas other than lodging products, like Experiences? Airbnb and its online travel peers have contended with moderating growth and changes in spending patterns following an initial post-pandemic boom. The company benefited from the removal of Covid lockdowns in the US in 2021 and the ensuing trend of "revenge travel" from customers with pent-up demand. Three years later, Americans have settled back into more typical vacation patterns and inflation has prompted them to become more careful with spending, causing market growth in the US to lag behind Asia and Europe. As travel companies search for ways to diversify income, ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence tools have exploded onto the scene, changing how people consume information online, including trip planning. Travel executives envision a future in which AI assistants recommend itineraries based on your past booking history or other online behavior, something that a brand-agnostic chatbot can't yet do unless you give it detailed prompts about your preferences. To achieve that, companies need to do a lot of behind-the-scenes plumbing to get all that customer transaction and behavioral data organized correctly so a branded AI assistant could surface the right results in the right place at the right time — all to retain your loyalty so you will reserve trips on their platform and not others. Airbnb is among the travel companies investing in the technical groundwork to make this a reality. To increase retention and learn more about its users, it has spent the last few product release cycles refining the app and working to improve its brand reputation. That has included removing tens of thousands of low-quality listings, enriching user profiles and introducing limited-edition stays related to local cultural icons. Chesky thinks in 2025, the platform will be ready to offer — and more importantly for the business— cross-sell more products when a traveler books a stay. "We're going to completely reimagine our search and discovery engines to cross-sell Experiences after you book a home," he told analysts in an August earnings call. "We can do this without a lot of incremental investment because we can market homes and experiences in the same ad." So, for example, jet skiing or surf classes would be recommended for a beach rental booking, and wine-tasting or cooking classes will be suggested for foodies staying near vineyards. Consumers don't currently see Experiences on the main page of the website and app, so Chesky said the company is working to raise awareness by recruiting "the most interesting people in the world" to offer those unique vacation activities and take a video-first approach to market them to customers. These new products would take more than one to two years to scale and reach a network effect, Chesky said, even though some will be available in more than 100 countries around the world at launch. "Trying to get a good understanding of what the actual repeat usage is will be what matters over the long run, not just how many new people you can get," Robert Mollins, an analyst at Gordon Haskett who has an "underperform" rating on the stock, said in an interview. The other part of the challenge for Airbnb, he said, will be finding enough suppliers for those guest amenities and travel activities in vacation towns and rural destinations alike. Starting small will be key for those new guest offerings to secure early revenue gains, said Mollins, who said he found himself placing Instacart or Whole Foods grocery orders every time he checked into an Airbnb. Most American consumers "don't have a lot of money," he said. "If they can get the pricing right, and have it just be a couple of items ready for you, like water, extra body wash, small little necessities, I think that should be a nice little add-on." That little add-on is a far cry from Chesky's ambitions. Either way, it will hinge on whether consumers have extra money to spend — on top of cleaning and service fees — and view Airbnb as more than just a place to stay.—Natalie Lung Wildfires have become even more prevalent and dangerous in an era of rising global temperatures. Now a number of startups have developed a new generation of sensitive smoke detector equipment they say can find and fight forest fires before they escalate. California ride-hailing unicorn inDrive, exploring opportunities in emerging markets, invested in Pakistan's grocery delivery startup Krave Mart. British Airways owner IAG is in discussions with Elon Musk's Starlink to outfit its jet fleet with Wi-Fi service. Amazon's nascent Project Kuiper is also under consideration. AT&T gained the approval of regulators to replace old copper home-phone lines with a new wireless landline technology. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment