Last year, Airbnb released 150 upgrades to improve every aspect of Airbnb’s service. Today, Airbnb is making the biggest changes to the platform in a decade, including:
⦁ Airbnb Category – A new way to search that lets you easily discover millions of properties you never knew existed.
⦁ Split Accommodation – An innovative feature that provides more options for longer stays by splitting your trip between two families.
⦁ AirCover for guests – the most comprehensive protection for travel, free with every stay.
“The way people travel has changed forever. That’s why we’re introducing the biggest change in a decade for Airbnb,” said Brian Chesky, CEO and co-founder of Airbnb. “First, people are more flexible about where they live and work, so we designed a new way to search using Airbnb categories. Splitting your trips between them gives you more choice. Third, we are introducing AirCover for guests, so you can book with confidence knowing that Airbnb has your back.”
These platform updates come on the heels of a tourism rebound in the Philippines, which has seen continued surge in travel interest from international and domestic guests since the country reopened internationally on April 1. The most popular summer destinations in the Philippines, based on Airbnb searches by Filipino guests in Q1 2022, include:
⦁ Angeles City, Central Luzon
⦁ Subic, Central Luzon
⦁ Mabalacat, Central Luzon
Antipolo, Calabarzon
⦁ Calatagan, Calabarzon
⦁ Cagayan de Oro, Northern Mindanao
⦁ Panglao, Central Visayas
⦁ St. John, Calabarzon
⦁ Bacolod, Western Visayas
⦁ Silang, Calabarzon
Guests are also exploring more destinations than ever before, with more than 60 new towns and cities in the Philippines welcoming their first Airbnb guests since the pandemic. These include lesser-known tourist attractions including Donare Medio Trinidad in Bulacan and Barto in Leyte.
Airbnb categories
Millions of people are now more flexible about where they live and work. But travel search has been around for 25 years — you type a place and a date into the search box. Most of us can only enter a few dozen cities into the search box, but there are Airbnbs in 100,000 towns and cities around the world.
That’s why Airbnb has launched a new search method designed around Airbnb categories, with 56 new categories that organize homes based on their style, location, or distance from travel activity. When you search for a destination, your search results are also organized by categories related to that destination, making it easy to discover millions of unique homes you never knew existed. As you view different categories, the map intelligently zooms to show you where homes are located.
To create the Airbnb category, Airbnb evaluated millions of homes using machine learning to analyze titles, written descriptions, photo descriptions, structured data from hosts, and reviews from guests. Members of Airbnb’s curation team review listings and hand-pick featured photos—so if a listing falls into the “Amazing Pool” category, the first photo will show the pool. Each category then goes through a final check to help ensure consistency and photo quality.
Airbnb’s 56 categories include more than 4 million unique homes created by Airbnb hosts around the world. Airbnb categories organize homes based on their uniqueness, which helps people discover places they wouldn’t otherwise be able to find. This can help alleviate overtourism by reallocating travel to new locations outside the same popular destinations.
Split accommodation
Nearly half of the nights booked on Airbnb in the past three months were for trips of a week or more. That’s why Airbnb introduced Split Stays, an innovative feature that splits your trip between two homes. With split accommodation, you will typically see around 40% of listings when searching for longer accommodation.
When searching for a specific destination, Split Stays will automatically appear in your search results. They also appear in 14 categories – including camping, national parks, skiing and surfing – to inspire you to stay in two destinations on long trips.
When viewing Split Stays on the map, an animated line visually connects the two houses to show the distance between them and the order of accommodation. Once you choose to split your stay, you’ll be guided through an easy-to-use interface to book each stay, one home at a time.
AirCover for guests
After more than two years at home, millions of Filipinos are traveling again for the first time since the pandemic began. That’s why Airbnb created AirCover, the most comprehensive protection for travel. Always included and always free, AirCover represents the biggest upgrade to Airbnb’s customer service in a decade.
With AirCover, you get four protections every time you stay at Airbnb:
⦁ Reservation Guarantee – In case the host needs to cancel your reservation within 30 days of check-in, we will find a similar or better accommodation for you, or we will refund you.
⦁ Occupancy Guarantee – If you can’t get into your home and the landlord can’t fix the problem, we’ll find you a similar or better home for the duration of your original stay, or we’ll refund you.
⦁ Get Your Booking Guaranteed – If at any point during your stay you discover that your listing is not as advertised – for example, the refrigerator stopped working and your landlord can’t easily fix it, or there are fewer bedrooms than listed – you will You have three days to report it and we’ll find you a similar or better home, or we’ll refund you.
⦁ 24-hour Safety Hotline – If you feel unsafe, day or night, you have priority access to specially trained safety personnel.
AirCover has been designed directly into the Airbnb app and website, making it easy for you to contact an agent and resolve issues quickly. We have created a team of specially trained agents to provide last minute rebooking assistance. We have also significantly expanded our 24-hour safety hotline to cover 16 languages.
Available this week
This week, Airbnb’s redesigned app and website are rolling out globally, featuring unique homes in more than 50 categories, the innovative Split Stays feature and AirCover.
