Airbnb spots key shifts in the travel market

At a time of profound change for the market-reshaping travel platform, responding to a pandemic that hollowed out its main accommodation-booking business and now under the pressure that comes with being a public company, Airbnb’s latest release looks deep into three key shifts in the travel market.

Why it matters

Airbnb’s more than 100 new features, announced in a blog post, boil down to giving its users more flexibility. This is a trend observed at several points during the pandemic, by a variety of voices. As many as 78% of people now expect to be able to cancel at any time without being charged. Airbnb is responding to a consumer need that won’t simply go away again once the heat of the pandemic has passed.

The trends

• Flexibility: browsing and booking is changing with new ways to search. Dates, Matching, and Destinations now push a little past the previously fixed parameters users needed to search.
• Travel and life is blurring: remote work allows Airbnb’s key customer segment to get away without having to take holiday. Outside the US, where people get more holiday, this means they can travel during off peak times and weekdays. This is likely to persist – prior research found 74% of users were interested in living somewhere other than near their office once the pandemic is over.
• People are going beyond the main tourist hubs and staying longer: The share of stays 28 days or longer on Airbnb has increased from 14% of nights booked in 2019 to 24% in Q1 2021.

Key quote

“People can travel anytime, they are traveling to more places and they are staying longer. The lines between travel, living and working are blurring and we are upgrading our service to make it easier for people to integrate travel into their lives, and for more people to become Hosts” – Brian Chesky, Co-Founder and CEO of Airbnb.

Sourced from Airbnb, WARC