Adding Airbnb Experience Revenue Streams

We’ve talked before about Airbnb Experiences and how it’s something hosts might consider to add more monthly recurring revenue. Today we’ll talk a little bit more about how you might go about designing one of these.

How It’s Going

In 2018 Airbnb kicked off their Experiences product with over 3,000 experiences in 40 cities. Today, those number 50,000 in over 1000 cities. Clearly, people like the idea of a local showing them around and are willing to pay: average ticket price of an experience is $55.

Categories to Consider

While Food and Drink remains the favorite among guests (almost ⅓ of all Experiences bookings), there are all sorts of possibilities you might consider, based on your passions or things you are already doing informally for friends and family but may never have considered packaging together for guests.

Think about:

• Arts and crafts (painting, creating something)
• Concerts/music (you don’t have to be the musician: perhaps your home can be an intimate occasional venue)
• Classes/workshops (the platform offers everything from beekeeping to beermaking to coffee roasting…possibilities are endless)
• Nature (more than just taking people for a walk in the park…though that’s helpful too…it’s a chance for people to be social while enjoying nature)
• Sports (capitalize on trends and novelty like pickleball or Ultimate Frisbee)
• Food and Drink (think food tours or wine tastings or intimate private dinners)
• History (local history is some of the hardest to come by, and hence very appealing)
• Entertainment (stand-up, spoken word, plays)
• Social impact (give guests a chance to learn about — and help — a local cause or charity)
• Nightlife (use your knowledge to take people on a pubcrawl they’ll really remember)

Don’t be afraid to combine categories…the more unusual the experience the more it can stand out from the “same old same old.” Free idea? Shopping at a farmer’s market to make your own picnic which you get to eat after a nice hike. Check the food and drink, workshop, and nature boxes all at once!

What You’ll Need

Now that you’ve had a chance to brainstorm, here’s what you’ll need to launch your experience:

1. A catchy title (use the same wordsmith skills you put into your vacation rental listing title)
2. A detailed description of what you’ll do with guests (spell this out…there’s no such thing as “too detailed” here)
3. Minimum age of guests and skill level needed to participate
4. Maximum group size
5. The location of the Experience (be clear on the meeting point so as not to lose time trying to find people)
6. How long the Experience will last
7. What guests should bring (if anything)
8. High-quality photos of people on the Experience (this means you’ll need to take some friends and family on some beta version experiences to grab these photos)
9. Price!

Remember, just as with your vacation rental listing, you don’t have to run your Experience every single day of the week. Maybe you only want to do it on weekends or Wednesday nights. You choose, and as you learn what to tweak from guests who give you feedback, you’ll have added one more revenue stream to your vacation rental.

This is to say nothing of the virtuous circle between Experiences and Hosting. People who come on your Experiences can find out about your vacation rentals (nothing to stop you from giving them a card or other info) and those guests who have already booked your vacation rental are an endless stream of potential customers for your Experiences.

This content originally appeared in our twice-monthly Guest Book newsletter.