Airbnb has often talked about looking beyond the home, and this week it moved closer to that goal with a platform launch that consolidates all your trip needs into a single app. With this step, company chief executive Brian Chesky proclaimed Airbnb to be a true “trip platform.”
With any platform, you’re going to have some integrations with third-party software. Here, the company teamed up with Detour to provide audio walking tours and Resy to manage restaurant reservations. But there are no plans to make a public API available…at least not yet.
“We’ve always wanted to start with the…travel experience [users] are having out there. We need to highly curate what services and third parties we work with,” said Mike Curtis, Airbnb’s vice president of engineering. He promised to examine prospective tie-ins “partnership by partnership.”
The integration of Detour and Resy marks the first time outside services have become part of the Airbnb experience, as the company slowly encourages guests to rely on it as their main travel companion. There are similarities here with the playbooks from companies like Facebook, Google, and Uber.
When asked why such an honor was bestowed upon Detour and Resy, Airbnb replied in a statement: “In Places, we want to bring cities to life beyond standard tourist attractions.
Detour does this in a unique way through their experiential walking tours. Resy also brings a unique angle to Trips — their curated, hand-picked approach allows people to experience locations through food. Providing access to the best local restaurants makes them a perfect parter for us.”
Travelers today rely on multiple apps to navigate cities they’re visiting. Instead of using one app for your flight or driving directions, another for booking accommodations, and then others — like Foursquare, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook, and Peek — to help you figure out what to do, Airbnb is looking to consolidate everything into a single destination.
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