Executive Overview
For well over a decade, Airbnb has wrestled with a stubborn corporate paradox: while its core home-sharing platform redefined global travel accommodation, its ancillary ventures in the tours and activities sector struggled to find a definitive footing. First launched more than ten years ago, Airbnb’s experiences division suffered through a series of false starts, strategic pivots, and pandemic-induced suspensions. For a long time, the company maintained a rigid ideological resistance to high-demand, mainstream tourist landmarks—eschewing cookie-cutter excursions like guided tours of the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum in favor of hyper-curated, quirky host-led outings.
However, the modern travel landscape demands pragmatism over dogma. In a major strategic about-face, Airbnb has relaxed its long-held aversion to mainstream tourism infrastructure. More critically, it has embarked on an ambitious, high-stakes expansion vector: marketing directly to locals within their own hometowns.
This pivot toward domestic, resident-driven engagement represents uncharted territory. Historically, the experiences sector—dominated by giants like GetYourGuide, Viator, and Klook—has focused almost exclusively on inbound travelers seeking to check off bucket-list items while away from home. Convincing urban residents to purchase leisure, cultural, or recreational experiences in the very cities where they live, work, and sleep is a notoriously difficult consumer behavior to manufacture.
Yet, according to Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, speaking recently at the Skift Global Forum 2026, the company’s carefully calibrated 2025 relaunch is yielding unprecedented results. By anchoring its initial playbook in a single market—Paris—Airbnb claims to have unlocked a formula that defies traditional travel industry norms. With reported year-over-year growth surging sixfold in the French capital, Airbnb is now exporting its localized playbook to global metropolises like New York City, setting the stage for a broader rollout across a thousand cities worldwide.
This in-depth investigative report examines the turbulent evolution of Airbnb’s experiences business, analyzes the operational mechanics driving its surprising breakthrough in Paris, evaluates the competitive landscape, and assesses whether the platform can successfully scale this local-first model globally.
Detailed Chronology: A Decade of Pivots, Pauses, and Perseverance
To understand the magnitude of Airbnb’s current strategy, one must trace the winding, often unpredictable evolution of the company’s experiences segment. The journey reveals a corporate entity willing to radically dismantle and rebuild its product offerings in pursuit of the elusive "superbrand" status.
Phase 1: The Vision of Hyper-Curated Authenticity (2016–2019)
When Airbnb officially introduced "Trips" in November 2016 at an event in Los Angeles, Brian Chesky pitched it as the ultimate evolution of the platform: moving beyond mere places to stay and encompassing the entire journey. Initially divided into Experiences, Restaurants (via a partnership with Resy), and Places, the core thesis was rooted in peer-to-peer authenticity.
Airbnb actively discouraged traditional commercial tour operators. Instead, it empowered locals—ranging from indie musicians in Los Angeles to truffle hunters in Florence—to host travelers on intimate, deeply personal adventures. The platform took a hefty 20% commission on experiences, banking on the idea that travelers craved insider access over mass-market sightseeing. While these offerings won praise for their creativity, they suffered from scalability issues. Booking volumes were inconsistent, quality control across thousands of unique, unvetted micro-entrepreneurs was a persistent operational headache, and the total addressable market remained confined to inbound vacationers.
Phase 2: The Pandemic Disruption and Strategic Retreat (2020–2023)
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 dealt a severe blow to the travel industry at large, but it forced an unexpected, temporary pivot for Airbnb’s experiences team. With physical travel brought to a grinding halt, the company launched "Online Experiences," allowing users to take virtual cooking classes with Italian grandmothers or attend meditation sessions with Buddhist monks via Zoom.
While Online Experiences enjoyed a momentary PR boost during global lockdowns, they proved economically unsustainable as a long-term business model once borders reopened. As Airbnb streamlined its operations to prepare for its blockbuster late-2020 initial public offering (IPO) and subsequent post-pandemic recovery, the physical experiences division was largely placed on the back burner. Resources were funneled into shoring up the core accommodations business, addressing host relations, and managing regulatory crackdowns in major urban centers. The experiences division languished, viewed by Wall Street analysts as a secondary distraction from Airbnb’s primary cash cow.
Phase 3: The Quiet Sunset and 2025 Relaunch
By the mid-2020s, it became evident that the original iteration of Airbnb Experiences required a radical overhaul. The company quietly rolled back several legacy rules, signaling a cultural shift within leadership. The stubborn refusal to list mainstream landmarks—long viewed by purists as antithetical to the "Live Like a Local" ethos—was quietly abandoned. Airbnb realized that modern travelers do not view visiting the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre as mutually exclusive with seeking out hidden gems; rather, they demand a seamless, unified booking apparatus for both.
In 2025, Airbnb executed a comprehensive, ground-up relaunch of the experiences vertical. Rather than deploying a scattershot global marketing campaign, Chesky and his executive team applied a strict, disciplined restraint: they chose to focus relentlessly on getting one city right before scaling anywhere else. That city was Paris.
Supporting Context & Metrics: Decoding the Paris Breakthrough and the "Local" Anomaly
The decision to focus exclusively on Paris as the crucible for the relaunched experiences platform was both symbolic and strategic. As one of the world’s most heavily touristed destinations—and a city intimately familiar with Airbnb’s accommodations business—Paris presented a high-stress testing ground.
The Mathematics of a Sixfold Surge
According to data disclosed by Chesky at the Skift Global Forum 2026, the strategic focus on Paris has generated remarkable momentum, boasting growth of 6x year-over-year. For a mature platform of Airbnb’s scale, triple-digit and multi-fold growth metrics in a resurrected product category are rare and demand scrutiny.
Industry analysts point to several structural catalysts driving this expansion:
- Inventory Refinement: By shedding poorly performing, niche experiences and opening the doors to professionally managed, high-demand mainstream attractions, Airbnb immediately increased conversion rates. Users searching for Paris itineraries no longer experienced friction or redirected to third-party sites for major monuments; they could bundle their museum tickets, walking tours, and quirky artisanal workshops under a single Airbnb transaction.
- Algorithmic Integration: Airbnb embedded experience recommendations deeply into the accommodation booking funnel. When a user books an apartment in the Marais district, the platform’s recommendation engine dynamically serves hyper-relevant local activities, drastically reducing customer acquisition costs.
Cracking the "Local" Consumer Mindset
The most profound revelation of the Paris pilot, however, was not the adoption rate among inbound tourists, but the unexpected behavior of domestic residents.
"One of the reasons they’re growing is we’ve now started to crack locals," Chesky stated during his conference appearance. "Locals in Paris are booking experiences in Paris, something we never thought would happen…"
Historically, travel platforms conceptualize their audience through the lens of displacement: people traveling away from their home addresses. Local leisure economies are typically captured by localized ticketing systems (like municipal cultural passes), localized aggregators, or word-of-mouth networks. Major global OTAs (Online Travel Agencies) have historically failed to capture local residents because their marketing funnels, search algorithms, and brand associations are inextricably linked with traveling elsewhere.
Airbnb’s breakthrough in Paris suggests a blurring of lines between "tourist" and "resident." Urban dwellers—weary of algorithmic fatigue, seeking novel weekend activities, or looking to rediscover their own cities through curated lenses—are turning to the platform for local enrichment. Whether it is a specialized culinary workshop in Belleville, an architectural walking tour of Haussmannian boulevards, or an exclusive artisanal crafting session, Parisians are utilizing Airbnb not just when they pack their bags for a holiday, but on ordinary Tuesday evenings and weekend afternoons.
Official Statements and Industry Analysis
The strategic pivot has sent ripples across the broader travel-tech ecosystem. Competitors in the tours and activities space—such as Klook, Viator (Tripadvisor), and GetYourGuide—have spent years investing heavily in supply-side aggregation and digital booking infrastructure, yet none have successfully unlocked the resident-local market at scale in the way Airbnb claims to be doing.
The Leadership Perspective
Brian Chesky’s remarks at the Skift Global Forum underscored a newfound confidence in Airbnb’s platform architecture. Having spent years refining the underlying technology, customer support frameworks, and host quality controls, leadership believes the operational machinery is finally robust enough to support rapid geographic replication.
"So now we’re taking that playbook to New York and other cities," Chesky noted. "And I think we’re not even close to that happening in 1,000 cities, but I think that will happen soon."
This statement signals a deliberate shift from a "test-and-learn" incubator phase to an aggressive, accelerated global rollout. New York City—with its massive dense urban population, high disposable income demographics, and vibrant cultural ecosystem—serves as the natural proving ground to test whether the Paris phenomenon is a European anomaly or a universal consumer trend.
Industry Reception and Skepticism
While financial analysts have welcomed signs of diversification outside of traditional short-term rentals—especially given ongoing regulatory pressures and municipal crackdowns on housing in cities like New York, Barcelona, and Berlin—some tourism economists urge caution.
Dr. Elena Vance, a senior travel-tech market researcher based in London, notes that while the growth metrics are impressive, sustaining local engagement requires a distinct operational paradigm.
"Getting inbound tourists to book an experience is a transactional necessity; getting a local resident to repeatedly use an accommodation-first app for their weekend leisure is an entirely different behavioral hurdle," Vance explains. "Airbnb’s brand equity is anchored in staying somewhere else. To truly capture locals, they must fundamentally rebrand their app in the consumer’s mind from a ‘vacation tool’ to a ‘lifestyle companion.’ That requires persistent, localized marketing spend that goes far beyond algorithmic cross-selling."
Furthermore, questions remain regarding host economics. As Airbnb embraces mainstream, high-demand tours alongside its traditional quirky offerings, the platform risks commoditizing the very supply that initially made its experiences distinct. Balancing the economic viability of professional tour operators against the romantic appeal of local hobbyists will be one of the division’s central balancing acts moving forward.
Future Outlook: Scaling the Playbook to a Thousand Cities
As Airbnb transitions from its Paris incubator to a broader global expansion strategy, the roadmap for the experiences division over the next 24 to 36 months comes into sharper focus.
1. The New York Test and North American Scaling
With New York City acting as the primary successor to Paris, the platform must navigate a complex regulatory and cultural landscape. Unlike European capitals where walkable urbanism and domestic weekend culture are deeply entrenched, North American cities present unique commuting and geographic challenges. If Airbnb can replicate its sixfold growth metric among Manhattan and Brooklyn residents, it will validate the universality of the playbook. Following New York, tier-one global hubs such as London, Tokyo, Sydney, and Rome are widely expected to receive localized rollouts.
2. Evolving the Superapp Ambition
Airbnb’s long-term corporate trajectory has long pointed toward becoming an end-to-end "superapp" for travel and lifestyle. By successfully integrating mainstream monuments with hyper-local resident experiences, the company is constructing an ecosystem where users interact with the platform 365 days a year, rather than just during their two-week annual vacation. If locals open Airbnb to find a cooking class down the street on a Friday night, the frequency of app engagement skyrockets, insulating the business against macroeconomic downturns that might otherwise depress long-haul international travel.
3. The Competitive Response
The reinvigoration of Airbnb Experiences places immediate pressure on legacy activity aggregators. Companies like GetYourGuide and Viator must now evaluate whether they, too, can tap into the local resident market or if they will cede urban lifestyle leisure to Airbnb’s massive brand reach. We can anticipate aggressive marketing campaigns, loyalty program enhancements, and supply-side exclusivity deals as the battle for the global activities market intensifies.
Conclusion
Airbnb’s journey with its experiences business is a masterclass in corporate resilience and strategic adaptation. What began a decade ago as an idealistic, albeit fragmented, experiment in peer-to-peer tourism nearly stalled out under the weight of scaling challenges and pandemic disruptions. Yet, by shedding rigid dogmas, embracing mainstream attractions, and stumbling upon an unexpected breakthrough with local residents in Paris, Airbnb has breathed new life into a foundational pillar of its long-term growth strategy.
As the company deploys its Paris playbook to New York and lays the groundwork for expansion across a thousand cities, the stakes could not be higher. If Chesky and his team can successfully institutionalize the habit of local booking on a platform built for global travel, Airbnb will not only conquer the tours and activities sector—it will permanently redefine the relationship between urban residents and the cities they call home.
