Airbnb’s Rebranding & What It Says About the Service Economy
The issue with scaling local services and experiences, and how AI might play a part in Airbnb’s future
Airbnb has been trying for almost a decade to expand its business beyond just vacation rentals. The company first introduced “Trips” in November 2016, allowing Airbnb hosts to offer curated activities to travelers, aiming to immerse guests in local cultures and communities. In June 2019, it launched “Airbnb Adventures,” expanding beyond its one-off Experiences into weeklong treks. During the COVID lockdown in 2020, the company tried its hand at virtual experiences. Then in 2023, the company briefly paused taking submissions of new experiences to “refocus on core offerings.” Last summer, it re-launched the Experiences platform and introduced a new ”Icons” experiential series centered around pop culture IPs.
Despite all these repeated forays into the experience economy, Airbnb is still mostly seen as a vacation rental marketplace — a quite successful one at that, but the company’s founder and CEO Brian Chesky clearly has grander ambitions. On Tuesday, the company rolled out its annual summer update for 2025, which brought forth its most dramatic attempt at category expansion to date. This update includes a sweeping app overhaul, a new celebrity-hosted experience series, and a brand new Service platform.
Here is how this attempt differs from Airbnb’s previous attempts to broaden its offerings, how they impact the hospitality industry, and what it says about the service economy in 2025.
Airbnb Adds a Personal Touch with Services
Airbnb’s redesigned app now features a Services tab (alongside Homes and Experiences) offering categories like photography, personal chefs, and prepared meals. Users can book these add-ons during a stay, or even without booking a home at all.
This update essentially bundles the common amenities of a nice hotel, like room service, spa, and gym, and delivers them to Airbnb users. The initial rollout includes 10 service categories (from chefs to massage therapists) across 260 cities worldwide. Each service provider is vetted for quality — the company says these professionals average 10 years of experience and must verify licenses and certifications.
Since you don’t need to book an Airbnb to use Airbnb Services. In other words, a New Yorker could fire up the Airbnb app to schedule a personal training session or a private chef in their own apartment, just as easily as a traveler might order room service at a hotel.
By extending its platform to everyday use cases, Airbnb hopes to become part of users’ weekly routines, not just something they open once or twice a year for vacation. As the company put it in its press release, Airbnb wants to be “a global community in the real world” that you can use every week in your own city — essentially an “everything app” for services, not just a rentals app.
Hotels have long touted amenities and concierge services as an advantage over renting a stranger’s home. If Airbnb can offer comparable perks — a masseuse on call, a chef to cook dinner, a guided workout — travelers might be less inclined to pay a premium for hotel service. That said, some travelers will still value the convenience and instant availability of on-site hotel staff, whereas Airbnb’s model requires scheduling a third-party service provider.
More importantly, this foray into local, personal services is somewhat at odds with Airbnb’s core business model, which has always been about one-off transactions. In contrast, services like haircuts, personal training, or massages thrive on repeat business and long-term relationships — a dynamic very different from vacation stays. If you hire a great personal chef or barber through Airbnb, you might want to use them again and again. But, as M. G. Sieigler pointed out in his column, neither the customer nor the service provider will want Airbnb in the middle of every repeat transaction, taking a 15% commission fee each time. The incentive is to take the relationship off-platform once trust is established, which is exactly what happens on many local service marketplaces. Therefore, Airbnb’s current Services offering will work well for travelers but not for locals, thus limiting its potential market.
Airbnb seems to be aware of this challenge. In a Wired interview, CEO Brian Chesky described plans to eventually offer “hundreds” of services — potentially as far-ranging as plumbing, cleaning, car repair, guitar lessons, and tutoring — all through Airbnb, with the company taking its cut. The vision is expansive, but it assumes people will continuously use Airbnb to find and book these providers. But unlike digital experiences, human-powered services just don’t scale easily.
Airbnb Revamps Experiences, Adds Celebrity Hosts
Alongside Services, Airbnb has reorganized its ever-morphing Experiences initiative — an effort to sell tours, activities and local adventures that complement vacation rentals. “It was like our Newton,” Chesky says of the original Experiences, comparing it to Apple’s infamous premature PDA device. The concept was sound, he insists, but the timing wasn’t right and execution was lacking. Now, he’s trying again with the benefit of five times as many customers and a more developed ecosystem to promote these offerings.
With the new design overhaul, Airbnb Experiences gets its own tab in the top menu bar. It now comes with a trimmed-down, curated catalog of nearly 20,000 experiences in 650 cities The focus is on quality and uniqueness, as well as affordability, with the average experience costing around $66.
Notably, Airbnb is also introducing a splashy new concept called Airbnb Originals, which are limited-time experiences hosted by celebrities and luminaries. Early examples include things like playing football and then having Kansas City BBQ with NFL star Patrick Mahomes, or an anime makeover session with hip-hop artist Megan Thee Stallion. Airbnb is reportedly paying the celebrities a fee for hosting these stunt-y, one-off experiences as promotions for its broader experiential offerings, betting that their star power will draw user interest and press coverage.
Still, Airbnb’s past struggles with the experiential sector suggest a fundamental tension: just like personal services, truly bespoke, authentic experiences are costly to produce and don’t scale easily. To make the economics work, many supposedly unique tours end up looking more like cookie-cutter group activities — the very “tourist traps” Chesky wants to disrupt. Therefore, Airbnb’s challenge is to curate experiences that feel special and intimate, yet attract enough customers to be profitable for hosts and appealing for the company’s bottom line.
That said, there are some reasons for optimism. Travelers in 2025, especially post-pandemic, crave authenticity and personal connection in their trips — the kind of off-the-beaten-path activities Airbnb Experiences aim to provide. The company is also integrating social features (like seeing other guests who plan to attend an experience and messaging fellow attendees) to add a community vibe to these bookings. But, it remains to be seen if Airbnb can turn a curated collection of local activities into a reliable, scalable revenue stream.
The AI-Powered “Everyday App” Dream
With the new release, Airbnb explicitly wants people to turn to Airbnb in their day-to-day lives, not just for vacations. The addition of local services is a direct play for that non-travel engagement, and if it really wants to become an “everyday app,” then it would have to solve its scaling issues with the personal services it aims to provide. Could the advances in AI technologies be a potential solution?
Chesky has been openly enthusiastic about the potential of AI to transform travel planning. In fact, the second stage of his reinvention plan, per the Wired interview, is to make Airbnb user profiles so robust that they become “almost like a passport,” and then dive into AI-driven features. One idea on the table: an AI-powered travel concierge that learns your preferences and can handle complex trip planning or even help manage parts of your life. “Inspired by his relationship with [OpenAI’s] Sam Altman, Chesky hopes to build the ultimate agent, a super-concierge,” Wired reports, describing a vision of an AI helper that might start with automating customer service and eventually know you well enough to plan entire vacations or recommend services you’ll love. Chesky’s friendship with OpenAI’s CEO (cemented during Altman’s brief ouster crisis in late 2023, when Chesky was instrumental in advocating for his return) suggests Airbnb could be poised to leverage cutting-edge AI tech and perhaps even integrate with future AI platforms.
There is an intriguing dichotomy in Airbnb’s grand plan: on one hand, it’s doubling down on real-life, human-powered services — sending a masseuse or a chef to your door — which inherently don’t scale the way digital goods do. On the other hand, it’s betting on AI to enhance and personalize those offerings behind the scenes. In an era when many tech companies are racing to offer virtual assistants and automated agents, Airbnb is trying to augment IRL services with digital intelligence. The company is betting that AI can make finding and booking these human services seamless, or even anticipatory, but the actual fulfillment, and the ultimate quality of the service, remains in the hands of human workers, with hard-to-abstract interpersonal dynamics. This dichotomy reflects a key tension point in the service economy today.
At the end of the day, the service economy that Airbnb is tapping into is, by nature, more resistant to automation. But then again, that might just be the future that Airbnb is betting on: as superintelligent AI makes digital services ultra-cheap and accessible, truly human services could become more distinctive and valuable. And being the new discovery portal to those personal services and experiences instead of, say, Google, would certainly be a very important and profitable role that platforms will be fighting over.
Overall, Airbnb’s rebranding tells a larger story about the service economy in 2025: a post-pandemic craving for authentic, human-centered experiences amid a rise in AI and automation. By positioning itself as a platform for real-world connections — not just rentals — Airbnb aims to become a one-stop hub for local services and unique experiences. This move taps into consumer desires for personalization and emotional connection, while offering service providers global reach. However, challenges remain, including trust, safety, and competition from entrenched players in travel and hospitality sectors.
Still, Airbnb’s latest rebrand could test how well tech platforms can truly scale human-driven services. If it works, calling an Airbnb might one day mean a lot more than finding a place to stay — it could mean summoning the entire service economy to your doorstep. And if it doesn’t work, well, I’m sure Airbnb will try again soon.
