Global Group Creative Director
// Feature Development, User Experience, App Design, Marketing, Strategy, Launch
Airbnb
// Trips: Experiences, Places, Homes
2014—2017
Responsibilities
While working at Airbnb's agency of record (AOR), across a number of years, I had the opportunity to work on various Airbnb creative initiatives: feature concepting, product design, product development, brand storytelling, creative, strategy, and marketing. This culminated in an opportunity to consult with the Airbnb design team on the User Experience, Customer Research, Workflow, Design, Creative, and Marketing to build new product features and revenue source, for Airbnb called “Trips.” This initiative would complete Airbnb’s travel offerings, reinventing traditional travel events and excursions to integrate them into the experience of staying at Airbnb. After the alpha product tests, I transitioned to lead the creative and strategy teams on how we would market the launch the new features to make for the best market growth for Airbnb.
context
Convincing thousands of people to open their homes to strangers is no easy feat, much less creating a thriving community of travelers around the world that are interested in enegaing in the wide variety of expereinces that accompany travel, exploration and discovery.
Because travel had lost the human connection that once made taking a trip truly magical, I help Airbnb reinvent travel and hospitality with their new Trips platform. The challenge was to bring to life the many ways a personal connection—with hosts and other travelers—can enable a magical trip.
This reinvention happened in three ways: Airbnb is now offering end-to-end Trips, there are more ways to be a host (and be hosted), and discovery was enabled through guidebooks and continuous planning in-trip.
Challenge
Make complete Airbnb’s travel offerings, increase valuation, increase ROI, create new revenue streams, make it beautiful, make it a natural addition to Airbnb. Everything we make must have these three elements:
For Airbnb
Introduce Trips: Focus on the new components and deliver on the complete promise of Trips (unbundled from Homes).
Use hero experiences as a hook: Celebrate the most unique experiences; support with a scaled rotation of attainable Trips and Experiences.
Intuitive consumer focused design: Visualize what the Trips platform would look like in the Airbnb mobile Applications for iOS and Android.
Measure and ddapt: Build in analysis metrics, milestones, and performance analysis to change and adapt to engaging better platform usage.
For Guests
Create compelling stories in guest lives: Provide the opportunity for guest’s craft indelible memories of moments crafted of shared novelty, entertainment, inspiration, or education through unique / exclusive experiences.
Build tentpole experiences on current trends: Partner with celebrities and other “Icons,” to create one of a kind experiences to show and celebrate the places they reside while pairing
Solution
Bringing together where you stay, what you do and the people you meet all in one place, Trips & Expereinces is a people-powered platform designed to make travel both easy and magical. Focuse on Experiences, Places and Homes, with Flights and Services to be added in the future, Trips was to Airbnb a one stop planning shop for travelers, guests, and hosts.
Trips makes travel magical again by immersing travelers in communities around the world. Getting unprecedented access to local passions and interests, like violin making in Paris, or marathon running in Kenya. Helping guests discover the hidden gems that only locals know about via personal recommendations, and socialize with other travelers and locals at exciting events. Add that to three million bookable homes, and Airbnb becomes the one place to go for a truly different kind of travel experience.
We wanted every Trip you take to feel magical. So guests would no longer have to follow the maps, wait in the lines, and take photos of all the same sights. Now, you can access unique experiences, incredible homes, and local favorites—all from one app. Having already transformed where people stay when they travel through people-powered hospitality, Airbnb is taking this same people-focused approach to the rest of the trip and, in doing so, providing a way for people to make money from their passions and interests.
“Until now, Airbnb has been about homes. Today, Airbnb is launching Trips, bringing together where you stay, what you do, and the people you meet all in one place.
We want to make travel magical again by putting people back at the heart of every trip.”
—Brian Chesky, Airbnb CEO
Launch
Trips Platform
Experiences
Experiences are handcrafted activities designed and led by local experts – be it a single activity like a Samurai Swordplay workshop or an immersive multi-day experience like learning about and driving classic cars in Malibu. Experiences offer unprecedented access and deep insights into communities and places that you wouldn’t otherwise come across, such as Truffle Hunting in Tuscany or the grime music scene in London.
Trips launches with around 500 Experiences in 12 cities worldwide, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Detroit, Havana, London, Paris, Florence, Nairobi, Cape Town, Tokyo and Seoul. From today, budding hosts in those and a further 39 cities worldwide can request to list their Experience.
Airbnb Experiences can be anything from cooking classes to guided tours. Hosts often have a lot of knowledge of their local area, and by giving them an opportunity to share that knowledge, Airbnb moved into an interesting place in the tourism industry.
A number of Experiences will also be available where guests can give something back to communities through non-profit organizations. In Detroit for example, Khali Sweeney provides an opportunity to go behind-the-scenes at his Downtown Boxing Gym that provides local children with an after-school program of healthy snacks, homework time, and boxing lessons.
Places – Guidebooks, Meet ups and Audio Walks
Trips brings places to life through the people that live there, reflecting the recommendations of hundreds of thousands of Airbnb hosts, neighborhood insiders and local influencers and is an alternative to aggregated tourist lists that funnel people to the same places.
With Insider Guidebooks, Airbnb has identified cultural experts and neighborhood insiders to recommend the hidden gems within their city. Find the perfect run from a marathoner, the best dive bar from a local mixologist and the next great undiscovered restaurant from an up-and-coming chef. 100 Insider Guidebooks will be available at launch in six cities – Los Angeles, San Francisco, Havana, Nairobi, Detroit and Seoul – with more coming soon.
As well as Insider Guidebooks, Places includes over one million individual recommendations worldwide from Airbnb’s home hosts, recommending their favourite hidden gems in their neighborhoods, from cafes and restaurants to parks and other local attractions. A partnership with restaurant booking platform, Resy, will make it possible for people in future to book tables at great local restaurants directly through the Airbnb app.
Airbnb has also struck an exclusive partnership with Detour to offer access to amazing experiential audio walking tours allowing people to discover neighborhoods in a totally unique and authentic way. At launch, audio tours will initially be available for Los Angeles with San Francisco, Paris, London, Tokyo and Seoul to follow by Spring 2017.
With Trips, Airbnb also wants to make travel more social, helping connect the thousands of Airbnb users in a city on any given night. Meet ups within Places will let local businesses host one-off or regular events for Airbnb guests and locals to connect with each other.
Homes
With three million homes available to book across 191 countries, Airbnb offers the largest and most diverse range of unique accommodation options for travelers which will now be available to book alongside Experiences in available cities.
Design
When Airbnb set out to design their app, they wanted it to be as welcoming and helpful as a gracious host. Using Material Design principles, the company took a direct approach to communication, creating a visual language that’s clear and understandable to its diverse user base. This conversational interface has garnered Airbnb over 84,000 five-star reviews and a Material Design Award for focused efficiency in 2016.
We started by defining a set of core characteristics to guide the design. In order to appeal to travelers and hosts from any region or native language, the app had to feel unified, universal, conversational, and iconic. This meant streamlining essential tasks, and ensuring that each design element fit into a larger system. Airbnb replaced the left navigation bar on Android with the bottom navigation bar that now exists on both iOS and Android, to better unify the cross-platform experience. Karri Saarinen, Design Lead at Airbnb explains how the switch served to reinforce the company’s vision:
Host-supplied photography is crucial to the Airbnb experience. Whether it’s a rustic home in the high desert or an urban loft, rich imagery gives users a window into each destination. Letting photography lead gives the UI a bold and uncluttered appearance, and makes navigating from listing to listing easy and comfortable.
An emphasis on photography and ample white space helps people focus on essential information.
Marketing
Live in the present
Give the 5,950 unique experiences available on Airbnb to individual travelers
Society has evolved to value experiences over things. Yet, we’re still looking for the perfect thing to wrap up in a box. Somewhere out there, there’s a perfect trip for everyone. It used to be locked away in our imagination, but now, data signals and magical technologies make it possible for us to divine the components of your perfect trip. And now that Airbnb can deliver the entire trip from end to end, we can gift it to you.
social/mobile, host discovery
A digital engine that helps travelers discover their ideal Airbnb Trip
Airbnb LIVE
A portal to what’s happening on hosted experiences anytime, anywhere
Celebrity Solos
Celebrities take Trips to see a new side of familiar places and activities
mobile, Trip'n
Make it possible for travelers to step into the world of an Airbnb experience host.
There’s no use going back to yesterday, I was a different person then. The possibilities to build unique experiences with Trips are boundless; those possibilities are sure to pique travelers’ curiosity. Airbnb will reward all levels of that curiosity, by creating and seeding immersive peeks into what a magical end-to-end Airbnb trip looks and feels like.
OOH/content, Rabbit Holes
Installations that allow people to physically step into an experience host’s world
display, Zoom In
Demonstrate the unique perspective of Airbnb hosted experiences
video/mobile, A trip for you
Dynamically crafted personal invitations to the perfect Trip for you, from your Hosts
• Attended Events at Clubs and Bars: He enjoys a good night out (and might need to recover afterward).
• Likes Whitney Houston (twice): He’s for sure up for some music, but mostly if it’s Whitney Houston.
Dynamically crafted personal invitations to the perfect Trip for you, from your Hosts. We started with some data we scraped from Jonathan’s Facebook page.
• Checked in at 42 Cities: A frequent traveler, so we can reasonably expect he’ll be interested in exploring new places.
gift guide, Belongings
An experience-led branded gift catalog that pairs tangible gifts with incredible experiences
