Airbnb’s 2025 Summer Release has been highly anticipated thanks to the long-awaited, much discussed relaunch of the company’s Experiences vertical.
Today, on the heels of mixed first quarter financial results, the short-term rental giant did officially relaunch Experiences, along with another new vertical, Airbnb Services, and a new mobile application during a celebrity-studded event in Los Angeles.
The new and refreshed Airbnb categories come after the company said in February that it would spend up to $250 million on new lines of business this year. At the time, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky called for “the beginning of a new Airbnb,” in line with his oft-discussed plan to expand beyond Airbnb’s core business.
“Seventeen years ago, we changed the way people travel. More than 2 billion guests later, Airbnb is synonymous with a place to stay,” Chesky said. “With the launch of services and experiences, we’re changing travel again. Now you can Airbnb more than an Airbnb.”
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Chesky said he believes travelers often choose hotels for their service offerings, and they have traditionally chosen Airbnbs for the space.
“Now, we’re giving you the best of both worlds—amazing homes with services that make them even more special.”
And the new mobile app combines it all.
“To pull this off, it turns out we had to basically rebuild the company from the ground up,” Chesky said at the event. “We had to rebuild our technology from the ground up, starting with technology stack. We had to rewrite our application. We had to rethink how we do marketing. We had to build out entire new departments. We had to rethink how we recruit and work with our hosts to bring all this together. It was a massive effort.”
Chesky sees more down the line, as he spearheads the company's fresh verticals and app.
When asked during a roundtable interview following his address, Chesky said he does have an eye trained on the connected trip—an end-to-end, easy journey concept that has long been discussed and identified as a goal by other companies, such as Booking Holdings.
“This idea of making travel really easy, really seamless, is something that I think is absolutely in our future,” Chesky said. “I mean that itinerary ... we built that as a platform to be extensible. It's just the beginning, but we imagine eventually, you'll be able to import all your information. Even if you don't book your flight through Airbnb, we eventually want your flight information to [merge with] your itinerary, so you have one itinerary.”
Airbnb Services
Airbnb Services enables properties on its site to offer guests the ancillary services they may be seeking during a stay—and which they are accustomed to finding at hotels.
As Phocuswright manager of research and special projects Madeline List noted in a recent report, U.S. Short-Term Rentals 2025: B2B Technology and Distribution Landscape, “The hotel sector has long understood that profitability must be driven by ancillary revenue streams that go beyond room bookings alone. For STRs, these revenue sources are still in development.”
Services is launching with 10 categories: professional chefs, prepared meals, catering, photographers, certified massage therapists, spa treatments, personal training, hair stylists, makeup artists and nail specialists, with plans to add more in the future.
But Airbnb's strategy goes beyond its guests: these services can be booked to take place as part of an Airbnb stay or separately, for example at someone's home. This new line of business aligns with Chesky's comment during the company's Q4 2024 earnings call in February that he would “love for ... one day for people to use us once or twice a week.”
The company said service providers—which it also calls “hosts”—have an average of 10 years of experience and have gone through Airbnb’s identification verification process. It also noted that many Services hosts are “renowned in their fields,” including chefs from Michelin-starred restaurants and elite trainers.
Airbnb Experiences officially relaunches
The saga of Airbnb Experiences began almost a decade ago, with the company making some controversial moves in recent years.
After months of speculation about a relaunch and ongoing discussion about the experiences category in the travel sector, Airbnb outlined what’s coming in an official capacity.
In its relaunched version of Experiences, Airbnb said it will offer “a more authentic way to experience a city” through offerings “hosted by locals who know their city best.” It will be available to anyone using the app, regardless of whether they've booked an Airbnb. Experiences will be available in 650 cities to start.
“Today’s travel activities offer no real connection to the city you’re visiting,” Chesky said. “The most authentic way to explore a city is with the locals who know it best. With Airbnb Experiences, don’t just see a place—experience it.”
Airbnb will offer a wide range of experiences, including options to visit landmarks and museums, opportunities for food tours and cooking classes and outdoor and wildlife experiences, among others.
Airbnb said its experiences are vetted for quality in an ongoing process and they're built to be social. Travelers will be able to see who else on Airbnb has booked an experience and send messages to groups of attendees and individual attendees.
The company added that in some cities it will also be launching Airbnb Originals, which it described as “extraordinary experiences hosted by the world’s most interesting people.”
The company listed examples ranging from “transform into your anime alter-ego with Megan Thee Stallion in her Otaku Hottie Quest” to “spend a Sunday with Patrick Mahomes, learning how to throw the perfect spiral and enjoying Kansas City barbecue.”
With the launch of Services and Experiences, we’re changing travel again. Now you can Airbnb more than an Airbnb.
Brian Chesky, Airbnb
The move is reminiscent of Airbnb’s Icons, which launched last May and offered “extraordinary experiences hosted by the greatest names in music, film, television, art, sports and more.” The Icons launch earned a mixed response from the industry, with some in favor, some underwhelmed and some calling it a publicity stunt.
In November, Airbnb revealed the buzz generated by Icons along with group travel features contributed to the creation of 1.7 million new profiles on its platform since the May 2024 launch.
Airbnb’s new app
Airbnb’s app, launched in 2010, was originally designed for home bookings. Now, the company said it has rebuilt the app to help users “book everything in one place,” including services and experiences. The new “everything” app also has social media-like capabilities.
The platform is meant to work in tandem between offerings. While users can book a singular offering like a home, service or experience, the app “travels with you,” according to Airbnb.
Once a home is booked, the app makes recommendations for services and experiences to book, and upon arrival, guests are provided with check-in details and an itinerary.
For travelers, the app is also designed to promote inspiration and exploration with an Explore tab that will function as a homepage for home, experiences and services discovery. The app will also feature a Trips tab that outlines schedules and itineraries and a revamped messaging platform that allows for photo and video sharing and integrated payments. The app will store Airbnb profile information and allow users to share where they've traveled and see people they met on their trips.
“People are the center of Airbnb, and this is a little known fact, but we actually have 200 million verified identities,” Chesky said, noting how excited he is about the feature, which turns Airbnb into something “kind of like a social network in the real world.”
As a benefit for hosts, the new app includes tools to manage their properties, including a listing creation tool, a “Today” tab to assist with upcoming reservations, a calendar and a listing management tool for services and experiences.
During the roundtable, Chesky added that the application was built from the ground up—on a fresh tech stack—to allow for all processes to take place “in-house,” with tools built by Airbnb.
“Our app is actually ... six apps now in one,” Chesky said during the roundtable. “So, it's like an e-commerce app to book home service experiences. It's a travel itinerary, it's a profile ... social network, it's a calendar, it's a reservation system, like OpenTable, and it's a messaging platform like WhatsApp or iMessage.”
Chesky reiterated that Airbnb's apps had to be rebuilt to accommodate the company's new business ventures.
He continued: “Our calendar didn't have an hour-by-hour view, right? And if you're doing experiences, you need to build by hour. So we built all the tools in house.”
Mixed industry reactions
Initial reactions in the hours following Airbnb's 2025 Summer Release were mixed.
“It's all about re-accelerating growth in their core markets—so capturing a greater share of wallet from the traveler when they're going to that market—and that this gives them that opportunity,” said Jamie Lane, chief economist and senior vice president of analytics for short-term rental data firm AirDNA, who attended the LA event.
Lane also pointed to Chesky's mention of a new Google Calendar integration as a positive.
“The biggest feedback I got when talking with Airbnb Experience hosts was that you had to manage it all within the app, and there wasn't any outside connection. So allowing someone to ... block out the calendar [with] bookings through Airbnb ... now they're playing nice with the existing experience ecosystem.”
Mitch Bach, co-founder and CEO of TripSchool, said the launch is "brilliantly off-brand."
"The launch of a rebooted Experiences alongside a brand new Services product means Airbnb’s eyeing becoming the next everything app," Bach said.
"For a company so concerned with brand that they, for a long time, rejected professional tour guides and operators as not being local or unique enough, turning to the commodified sectors of hair and nail care seems counterintuitive. And yet, Services seems much easier to scale, and they keep users’ eyeballs on the app all year long, not just when they’re traveling, assuming we all also use it to call a plumber and get massages."
He continued: "A regular, repeat customer that doesn’t need to be reacquired is the holy grail of all the experiences marketplaces, so this is a brilliant ploy."
Christian Watts, founder and CEO of Magpie, said in an email that there are a number of opinions regarding what Airbnb needs to do to make its Experiences vertical successful again. With this release, he thinks it's possible the STR giant could prosper in the space.
“They might just have brought enough of the pieces together, along with the marketing push behind it, to make it a success this time,” Watts said.
He added on LinkedIn: “The OTAs [online travel agencies] won't like it, but it really does create healthy competition in the space.”
Others weren't impressed with the level of creativity promised versus what was delivered.
“Anyone else feel like this new Airbnb release just makes them a better branded version of Expedia?” Madison Rifkin, founder and CEO of Mount, said on LinkedIn. “The build-up to this announcement felt massive. I was expecting something game-changing. Instead, it’s just... more things you can book through Airbnb.”
Bach also said he's heard some negative feedback from the host community he runs on Facebook.
"I’m hearing from my Tourpreneur tour operator community that they’re experiencing a host of significant issues with the onboarding process for new Experiences, ranging from inaccurate AI description rewrites to automatic disapproval of highly rated experiences that have already been on the platform, and many are lacking clear direction from external teams."
Bach said he hopes Airbnb doesn't move at such a rapid pace that it potentially fails to deliver good service to existing suppliers.
"While suppliers aren’t the customer, they are the the soul, backbone and frontline workers of any platform, even if serving them well isn’t quite as newsworthy as a new product launch," Bach said.
*This reporter's attendance was sponsored by Airbnb.
Phocuswright Europe
Make plans to attend Phocuswright Europe in Barcelona from June 10-12 to hear from Emmanuel Marill, Airbnb's regional director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.