The Ultimate Concierge: AI and Airbnb
How Airbnb's AI Innovations Will Elevate the Guest Experience
In recent interviews with Skift, Airbnb’s CEO, Brian Chesky, announced that big updates are coming to Airbnb one year from now. Airbnb has not jumped on the AI train just yet and part of the reason is because they want to ship it with perfect design, like its users are used to. He said that ‘‘next May you’re going to see a whole new Airbnb and AI’s going to be at the center of it’’.
They are going to rebuild the whole website with AI at its core and the grand vision for Airbnb is to become the ‘‘ultimate concierge’’.
I took my time to research the possible AI updates Brian has already announced how Airbnb will use AI in the future to help hosts and guests have better experiences. This is also relevant to how other OTAs will use it as Airbnb is a lot of times the driver of trends in the market. Let’s dive deeper into each of them.
AI-Augmented Customer Service: Airbnb is planning to integrate AI into their customer service, aiming to aid customer service agents in quickly and accurately resolving user issues. With complex policies to navigate, AI can assist agents in selecting and applying the appropriate policy, improving both productivity and the quality of service. This feature will probably be rolled out already in November 2023.
Automated Review Summaries: Airbnb is developing an AI-driven feature to summarize large amounts of reviews for listings. This will enable guests to easily grasp the overall feeling of the place and key points from the feedback left by previous visitors. No more scrolling through countless reviews.
Photo to Text for Listings: To simplify the listing process, Airbnb is developing a feature that uses AI to identify amenities in a photo and automatically fill out the corresponding details in the listing. This will ease the process for hosts and ensure more accurate and complete listings for guests.
Improved Developer Productivity: Airbnb is leveraging AI to boost developer productivity, expecting a 20%-30% increase this year and potentially doubling in the next year.
Ultimate AI Concierge: The long-term vision is to develop the Airbnb app into an ultimate AI concierge service. This involves three layers: leveraging base models such as GPT-4, fine-tuning these models with Airbnb's customer data, and designing the ultimate AI interface, taking advantage of Airbnb's strengths in application, design, and product interface. The search bar will probably function as a prompt-based input just like we see in AI tools today but with better design. You will write a prompt and AI will scrape the Airbnb platform to find your places. E.g., show me houses in the south of Italy with an ocean view suitable for a couple working remotely.
The company seems to be focusing more on the app as the center for these AI innovations, as this is where conversational AI can be most effectively implemented.
Here are also some things that I didn’t find mentioned in the articles but are my ideas on how we can optimize the host and guest experience using AI.
Improving the Guest Experience: Think of it as your virtual experience designer. Not only is it important to optimize the digital experience for your guests, but it’s also important how to cater to your guests when they arrive at your house. Therefore, the VED will help you design a better experience before the guest's arrival, during their stay, and after their stay. The VED will potentially consult you that for a good welcoming experience, it’s good to buy a bottle of wine and present it to guests in a classy way. Maybe it will be able to give you examples of how it’s best to position the bottle of wine and how to write the perfect welcome message.
Creating Guidebooks: I remember that it took me a lot of time to create a guidebook on Airbnb for my guests. As it took too much time, I didn’t include all of the local recommendations I could. AI will help me with that and create a personalized guidebook for my guests. Based on the profile of the upcoming guests, it will help me find restaurants, activities and other offerings in my nearby location. It could read through the profile of the guests on the platform and based on their description and previous travels, recommend what they like or don’t like.
Photo Enhancer: A lot of hosts cannot afford a professional photographer. With the photo enhancer, you will be able to upload mediocre photos and AI will do its best to enhance it and thus improve your listing.
The main reason for harnessing AI seems to be maximizing personalization for guests and the transition, as Brian says, from asking ‘‘where you are going and when you are going to who you are and what you want’’.
Moreover, AI seems to be the driver for moving Airbnb beyond its core offering next year. It already appears that 20 % of its business is housing (long-term stays). This change is mostly driven by the increase in remote work and digital nomads. There are approximately 30 million digital nomads right now and based on the discussions and articles I read, most of them use Airbnb as their main go-to for housing.
I plan to cover more about how remote work is changing travel in one of the next issues as it is crucial to understand where things are moving in the industry.
Read more about these trends:
https://skift.com/2023/05/03/interview-airbnb-ceo-on-how-its-service-will-radically-change-with-ai-by-next-year
https://skift.com/blog/what-will-airbnb-launch-beyond-its-travel-core
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/travels-top-5-strategic-chat-gpt-questions-stuart-greif