#AirbnbOpen 2015 – Product Announcements Wrap Up – All About Airbnb
The 2015 Airbnb Open gathered in Paris more than 5000 hosts coming from all over the world, for a 3 days of talks, events and celebrations.
Airbnb has been working for months in preparation of the biggest host gathering ever held, and – as during the 2014 event – took the opportunity to make a number of announcements and show some numbers that normally stay behind the company’s walls.
During the Thursday’s afternoon keynote, Airbnb introduced quite a few product updates and new features, mostly focused on improving the experience for the host community.
The announcements can be grouped into 3 broad areas that will help users to become better hosts and get more out of the Airbnb platform:
1) Tools to become a better host
- Host Toolkits: a set of self-training tutorials to enable new users to easily grasp the basic understanding of Airbnb and quickly improve the quality of their listing (details available at www.airbnb-toolkits.com)
- Host Mentors: a peer training program, through which more experienced hosts can provide support to newbies, guiding them to their first reservation while obtaining a reward for their efforts (details available at www.airbnb.com/mentors)
- Community Center: a replacement for the soon-to-be-retired Airbnb Groups, based on a classic forum/bulletin board formula (available at community.airbnb.com)
2) Instruments to make host smarter
- Smart Pricing: an upgrade to the pricing tips available in your calendar, removing the hassle of having to think about and choose a price for a listing (yet to be rolled out globally)
- Host Assist & API: a deeper integration with external services and the birth of a more evolved ecosystem built around Airbnb (details available at www.airbnb.com/host-assist)
- Better and more info about guests and bookings: a few improvements to the reservation and booking management process (a new signup flow, mandatory guests’ profile photos, house rules in the checkout, and dedicated stats page).
3) Improvements to increase the number of guests and bookings
- Business Travel Ready: a set of guidelines, quality criteria and amenities to make your listing well suited for business travellers, one of the fastest growing segments on which Airbnb will be heavily focus in 2016 (more details at www.airbnb.com/business-travel-ready)
- Experiences: not really announced during the Open, but openly hinted during many of the talks, a maybe upcoming way to expand the business opportunities to something more than short term rentals (details are already available at www.airbnb.com/experience/signup)