Airbnb wants to be your whole vacation (and your AI concierge)

Booking a place to stay is usually the easy part of a trip. Figuring out what to do, who can cook dinner, or how to book a local surf guide once you arrive is where travel gets messy.

Airbnb has been trying to crack this for years. After pausing its experiences product back in 2023 to refocus on core home rentals, the company officially relaunched both Services and Experiences on Tuesday with a major global app redesign.

Travelers can now book these offerings alongside their stay or as standalone activities without booking a room at all.

Private chefs, beach volleyball, and local massages

The move is largely about tapping into unused attention. During Airbnb's Q1 2025 earnings call, CEO Brian Chesky pointed out that over 1.5 billion devices hit the platform over the past year, but a massive chunk of those visitors never booked a home.

Services are rolling out across 10 categories, including private chefs, catering, prepared meals, photography, massages, spa treatments, personal trainers, and hair and makeup. These are currently live in 260 cities across eight countries, with Airbnb taking a 15% cut.

Experiences span 19 categories across 650 cities worldwide, covering museum tours, outdoor adventures, cooking classes, and art workshops. Airbnb takes a 20% cut on these bookings. The rollout also features Airbnb Originals, offering celebrity-led events like beach volleyball with Olympian Carolina Solberg in Rio.

Hosts will have to pass credential checks, including reviews of experience, licenses, and web presence. Pricing appears as a single, all-in number for guests.

Group chats and a smarter concierge

Airbnb is also leaning into social mechanics. After updating user profile pages last year, the company saw completed profiles jump by 15x. Later this year, Airbnb plans to roll out group chats for people who joined the same experience, letting them share photos, videos, and recommendations.

Customer service is getting an overhaul as well. Earlier this month, Chesky introduced an AI customer service agent that actually answers questions inside the chat rather than redirecting people to help articles.

The AI bot is rolling out to English-speaking users in the U.S. by the end of the month, with international languages coming later this year. Airbnb eventually wants the assistant to act as a full-fledged trip concierge with inline booking and cancellation buttons.

Why it matters

For everyday travelers, having verified in-home services like private chefs or massages inside one app is undeniably convenient. However, a 15% to 20% platform cut will almost certainly get baked into local provider prices, so travelers will have to decide whether the convenience justifies the markup.

For the travel industry, this puts Airbnb into direct conflict with Viator, GetYourGuide, Tripadvisor, and even local service discovery apps like Yelp. Booking homes is a mature market, and expanding into daily itinerary spend is Airbnb's clearest path to new transaction volume.

We think untethering services from home stays is the smartest strategic choice here, turning Airbnb from an accommodation broker into a generalized local marketplace. But scaling physical services is notoriously messy. Massages, haircuts, and outdoor tours carry real liability and quality consistency hurdles that software cannot easily fix, and an AI chat assistant will have its work cut out for it when bookings go sideways in the real world.