Airbnb Sees Renewed Momentum in Experiences Business Through Localization Strategy
Airbnb has experienced a transformative shift in its secondary business vertical, successfully pivoting its "Experiences" strategy to capture a demographic that has historically eluded the travel platform: the local resident. Following a series of strategic missteps and a complete relaunch of the division in 2025, CEO Brian Chesky confirmed during the Skift Global Forum 2026 that the platform has achieved a sixfold year-over-year growth rate in its experiences segment, driven largely by a "hyper-local" pilot program in Paris. This development marks a significant departure from the company’s original vision of strictly tourist-centric activities, suggesting a new path toward long-term sustainability for a division that has struggled for over a decade.
A Decade of Iteration and False Starts
The evolution of Airbnb Experiences has been characterized by experimentation and internal pivots. When the platform first launched "Trips" in 2016, the ambition was to position Airbnb as a holistic travel company that controlled not just the lodging, but the entire itinerary of a traveler. The goal was to provide "authentic" local activities curated by residents, moving away from the mass-market tour operators that dominated the industry.
However, the model faced immediate headwinds. For several years, Airbnb maintained a rigid stance against listing mainstream, high-demand tourist attractions, such as skip-the-line tickets for the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum, fearing that such offerings would dilute the brand’s promise of uniqueness. By 2022, the company realized that the market for "niche" artisan workshops was not broad enough to support the scale required by a public company of Airbnb’s size. The business underwent a period of retrenchment during the pandemic, and in 2025, the company executed a comprehensive relaunch, finally opening its doors to the mainstream experiences that travelers were already searching for elsewhere.
The Paris Pilot: A Blueprint for Success
The decision to focus exclusively on Paris as a testbed for the revamped experiences platform was a deliberate exercise in constraint. By narrowing its operational scope, Airbnb was able to refine its supply-side strategy—recruiting higher-quality hosts and ensuring that the inventory aligned with the specific cultural and social habits of the Parisian market.
According to data presented by the company, the strategy of focusing on a single, high-density city allowed Airbnb to iterate its algorithms and marketing approach with greater precision. The most striking metric revealed by Chesky was not just the volume of bookings, but the composition of the customer base. By successfully courting Parisians to participate in experiences within their own city—such as niche culinary classes, neighborhood walking tours, or craft workshops—Airbnb discovered a recurring revenue stream that is decoupled from traditional seasonal tourism cycles.
"Locals in Paris are booking experiences in Paris, something we never thought would happen," Chesky remarked during his keynote at the Skift Global Forum. He noted that this "crack in the code" of local engagement is the foundational element of the company’s new playbook. With the Paris model demonstrating that a global platform can function as a hyper-local utility, the company is now preparing to scale this strategy to New York City and other global hubs.
Market Analysis: The Shift Toward Lifestyle Integration
The move to target local residents is a significant departure from the traditional Online Travel Agency (OTA) business model, which typically treats the resident as an external factor to be managed rather than a customer. By integrating experiences that appeal to those living in the city, Airbnb is effectively repositioning itself as a "lifestyle brand" rather than a mere lodging intermediary.
Industry analysts suggest this pivot addresses a critical flaw in the previous iteration of the platform. By relying solely on international tourists, the experiences business was inherently vulnerable to travel disruptions, such as the pandemic, geopolitical tensions, or currency fluctuations. A business model that includes local residents provides a hedge against these macro-volatilities. If a resident in a major metropolis uses the app for a weekend activity, the platform retains value even when international tourism dips.
Furthermore, this shift creates a stronger network effect. When a resident acts as a host, they often have better knowledge of the city than a professional tour guide, potentially increasing the quality of the product. When a resident acts as a guest, they validate the platform’s utility as a daily service, increasing the "stickiness" of the Airbnb application on the user’s mobile device.
The Broader Impact on the Experiences Industry
The global tours and activities market is estimated to be worth billions of dollars, yet it remains highly fragmented. Competitors such as Tripadvisor (via its Viator brand) and GetYourGuide have long dominated the sector by focusing on high-volume, mainstream tourism—the very segment Airbnb initially avoided.
Airbnb’s late-stage entry into the mainstream market, combined with its unique ability to cross-sell to its existing base of millions of apartment guests, creates a formidable competitive dynamic. The company’s ability to leverage its massive, pre-existing database of user preferences allows it to suggest experiences with a level of personalization that traditional, inventory-heavy travel platforms struggle to match.
However, the strategy is not without its risks. Marketing to locals requires a different brand positioning than marketing to travelers. Airbnb must balance its identity as a "travel" company with its new role as a "local activity" provider without confusing its core customer base. Additionally, the operational complexity of managing thousands of local hosts in diverse regulatory environments remains a hurdle that has caused many competitors to stumble in the past.
Scaling to 1,000 Cities: The Roadmap Ahead
Chesky’s assertion that the company is "not even close" to hitting its potential in 1,000 cities suggests that the Paris success is viewed as a scalable template. The company’s internal roadmap likely involves a phased rollout, prioritizing cities with high Airbnb supply density and a strong cultural appetite for independent, experiential activity.
Following the upcoming expansion into New York, the company is expected to look toward London, Tokyo, and other high-density, high-engagement markets. The success of this expansion will depend on the company’s ability to maintain the "local" feel of the experiences while managing the platform at a massive, global scale.
Official Stance and Future Outlook
While Airbnb has not released granular financial data specific to the experiences division, the 6x year-over-year growth figure serves as a strong indicator of market fit. For stakeholders, this shift signifies a move toward a more diversified revenue stream. Historically, Airbnb has been viewed by Wall Street as a lodging company with significant exposure to regulatory risk in the housing market. By diversifying into services and activities, the company is attempting to build a multi-layered ecosystem that can survive and thrive even if its primary lodging business faces regulatory headwinds in specific regions.
As the company looks toward 2027 and beyond, the focus will undoubtedly be on sustaining this momentum. If the "local" strategy continues to bear fruit, Airbnb may finally have found the missing piece of its long-term growth puzzle. By turning the traveler’s platform into the local’s daily utility, the company is attempting to achieve a level of market saturation that few, if any, travel companies have ever attained.
The next 18 months will be critical. As Airbnb moves from the controlled environment of the Paris pilot to the complex, diverse markets of North America and Asia, the company will need to prove that its "local playbook" is not just a localized success, but a robust, replicable strategy that can withstand the rigors of global competition. The transition from a lodging site to an "everything" platform for local activity is underway, and for the first time in a decade, the outlook for Airbnb’s experiences division appears to be aligning with the company’s broader ambitions.
