Dive Brief:
- Airbnb credited app upgrades and efforts to improve supply quality for growth in app bookings and improved satisfaction during Q3 2024, executives said during an earnings call last week. The number of nights booked via the app grew 18% year-over-year in the quarter and account for 58% of nights booked overall.
- Last month, Airbnb introduced more than 50 app upgrades, including recommended destinations, suggested search filters and personalized listing highlights, meant to make the app experience more intuitive and personalized for guests. Airbnb has launched more than 535 features and upgrades in the past three years.
- Airbnb also addressed one of the top issues for guests: listing quality. Since last year, the company removed 300,000 listings and continues to invest in improving the quality of guest stays, CEO Brian Chesky said.
Dive Insight:
Airbnb is making a big push toward improving the supply quality of its listings in an effort to improve host reliability, increase customer satisfaction and encourage customers to come back.
“We're already seeing this payoff,” Chesky said. “Customer service contact rates have decreased, guest NPS has improved, and we're also reducing host cancellations, which are now almost 30% lower than a year ago.”
To drive quality, the company introduced Guest Favorites — a collection of 2 million of the highest-rated listings based on customer feedback and reliability data — and began removing listings that didn’t meet customers’ quality expectations.
“What we see is that the average rating of our stays goes up,” CFO Ellie Mertz said.
Efforts to improve quality have improved the guest experience, increased rebooking rates and grown guest confidence in booking with Airbnb, Mertz said. At the same time, the rate of customers reporting incidents and reaching out to customer service declined.
Customers have booked over 200 million nights at Guest Favorite listings since it launched last November.
The company is also investing in AI-powered customer service.
“I don’t want to be one of the CEOs who just brings up AI every earnings call,” Chesky said, “But we are seeing some really great progress on AI-powered customer service.”
The company is in Phase 1 of its plan for AI-powered chatbots, which is answering basic questions, Chesky said. It plans to improve on its chatbot’s capabilities with personalization — Phase 2 — and taking action — Phase 3.
Airbnb’s revenue grew 10% year over year during the quarter to $3.7 billion.
