Airbnb introduces features based on guest preferences; Global head (Ops terms India as high growth market)

Airbnb has announced new upgrades to its booking platform to make it more competitive with hotels, including revamping its ratings and reviews pages and highlighting guest favourites or homes with a near-perfect rating. Tara Bunch, Global Head of Operations, shares trends and details in an exclusive interview with ETTravelWorld. “The first big upgrade is the guest favorites, which is a new category,” said Bunch. “We have taken 2 million of our most loved Airbnb listings (the most dynamic ones from among 7 million listings) based on ratings, reviews, reliability, quality of the listing and highlighted the top guest favorites. “We are also revamping our ratings and review pages to include a number of new features that now allow guests to sort reviews and be able to see more relevant information,” shared Bunch on the second upgrade. The feature includes reviews based on distribution, star ratings, user and host behaviour and suggestions based on comparison of similar amenities, among others. “The idea is to make the listings more relevant and helpful for guests. We would like to give them much more visibility and a lot more information before they book,” she said. And, the third big upgrade is the listings tab. “This is for hosts,” said Bunch. The upgrade has these amenities organised into groups (like bathroom amenities, bedroom amenities outside amenities, kitchen amenities, living room amenities). “What has us excited is that not only will there be more information about the listing, it would also allow current hosts to go back and play with this new listings tab. This would help guests find all the amenities in the listing, and at the same time, help the host to highlight just how many amenities their listing has,” said Bunch. The other upgrades feature improved competitive pricing and feature comparison tools for hosts for more visibility. “The hosts would now be able to compare service fees, cleaning fees being charged by similar facilities. And the guests would be able to see which listing would give them the best deal in the same neighbourhood with similar size and amenities. We think this will really help hosts to ensure that they remain competitive from a pricing standpoint,” she said. “The other improvements for the host include an earnings dashboard and some new features around co-host messaging and co-host payouts being able to split them between, a host and a co-host,” added Bunch. While the Guest Favorites, revamped ratings and reviews, the new Listings tab, and additional upgrades for hosts will begin rolling out this week, hosts can try new features today by enrolling in Airbnb Early Access, AirBnb said. “India is one of our most important highest growth markets – both from a guest and host standpoint – and we are incredibly committed to this market. It is also an important market to us from a talent standpoint. We recently opened up the India hub tech hub in Bangalore and we continue to invest heavily there,” said Bunch. “From a growth standpoint, Asia Pacific as a region has fully recovered to pre pandemic levels. We are seeing great growth, gross nights growing 23% in Q3 of 2023 compared to 2019. That’s massive growth in such a large region. Nights and experiences booked grew 27% in Q3 compared to 2022 so that’s another big, large growth and impact,” she said. “On our part, we have been working closely with the local governments to highlight India and properties in India,” said Bunch. Airbnb recently signed a MoU with the Ministry of Tourism to showcase India’s rich cultural heritage through a spotlight on heritage stays across the country. At the state level, over the last year, it signed MoUs with Goa, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, among others, to promote lesserknown destinations, conduct capacity-building workshops and raise awareness amongst communities on how to leverage their homes to reap economic benefits. “There's a lot of work happening in these areas. We are looking at these government partnerships as one of a critical approach to building the tourism ecosystem in India and through that also promoting more homestays,” she said. Women and economic empowerment “Hosting, a home or a room in your home in one of those areas, can create a lot of economic empowerment in smaller, maybe non-urban women. And more broadly, all Indians are particularly helpful in terms of spreading tourism to more rural communities, low density urban communities, and empowering local people who are looking for that extra money and can really help them make ends meet,” she added. Growing preference for hosted accommodations According to Airbnb, most popular outbound destinations for Indian travellers (based on nights booked data in India when comparing January 1 to September 30 2023, with the same period last year) were UK, US, Canada, UAE, France, Italy, Germany, Indonesia and Thailand. “North America and Western Europe have long been popular outbound destinations for travellers from India. These destinations also factor into the popular psyche by featuring in Bollywood films,” she shared. “Post pandemic we have seen different countries open up at different rates. But in Southeast Asia, we have seen a lot of growth in Korea and Japan. Travel and visas have become easier and people are feeling safe travelling. We saw domestic travel continue to remain pretty strong. And now we are seeing cross border travel increasing.