Airbnb reveals plan to build AI-powered "Amazon of travel" super app
"A place to stay is, frankly, a very small part of the overall equation."
Whilst Airbnb is undoubtedly a popular app, it suffers from one major challenge: users only log on once or twice a year to book and manage a holiday.
Now, the travel firm has revealed a plan to address this situation by building an Amazon-style super app - an all-in-one mobile application that integrates multiple services.
In the firm's most recent earnings call, Brian Chesky, CEO and co-founder, said that Airbnb has a "pretty big volume of users" but is "not a very frequently used app."
"People typically use us once or twice a year," he said. "And I would love one day for people to use us once or twice a week. That's one of the goals over the long term."
The proposed solution is to build an app which offers more than just travel so that customers log on throughout the year.
Although Chesky did not reveal exact details of what the super app will offer, obvious adjacent business areas could include experiences, food delivery, property rental, financial services through embedded finance and perhaps even some sort of social media offering to connect people who enjoy travelling.
"We want the Airbnb app to be kind of similar to Amazon, to be one place to go for all of your travelling and living needs," Chesky said. "A place to stay is just, frankly, a very small part of the overall equation."
He added: "We're going to start initially with things very closely adjacent to travel. So, when people book an Airbnb, there are a lot of experiences and services and other things that would make their stay more special.
"And it would even include things they wouldn't think to search for. And from there, we're just going to keep expanding, and we're going to expand out to more host services to enable them to become better hosts. And eventually, we'll move further and further away from our core."
The CEO drew an analogy with Amazon, which started out selling books but quickly moved into CDs and DVDs before stacking its virtual shelves with an ever-increasingly vast range of items to become the behemoth of today.
"We're going to probably follow that path," Chesky said.
In the earnings call, Chesky also shared plans for an AI transformation starting this summer, which will roll out agentic AI to improve (or ruin, depending on your perspective) its customer service.
He compared the current state of AI adoption and innovation to the mid-to-late 90s, when the Internet was in its relative infancy but poised to change the world.
Although AI-powered trip planning is on the roadmap, it is not due for imminent deployment.
"Later this year, we're going to be rolling out, as part of our Summer Release, AI-powered customer support," Chesky said. "As you can imagine, we get millions of contacts every year. AI can do an incredible job of customer service. It can speak every language 24/7.
"It can read a corpus of thousands of pages of documents. Over the coming years, what we're going to do is take the AI-powered customer service agent, and we're going to bring it into Airbnb search to eventually graduate to be a travel and living concierge. I think it's a really exciting time in the space because you've seen, with DeepSeek and more competition, that models are getting cheaper or nearly free.
"They're getting faster, and they're getting more intelligent. And they are, for all intent and purpose, starting to get commoditised. What I think that means is a lot of value is going to accrue to the platform. Ultimately, I think the best platform and the best applications are going to be the ones that accrue the most value from AI.
"And I think we're going to be the ones to do that with travelling and living."
Airbnb is currently used by 1.6 billion devices a year.
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