WHAT?! See What Else You Can Book on Airbnb Right Now
It probably started when you planned a getaway and then (whoops) were stuck without a place to stay. What’s a girl to do when everything’s all booked up and there’s no where to go? Marriott points and sweet talking the staff can only get you so far — until Airbnb came through to solve all of your problems with the pad of your dreams for a night or two. Now you’re probably skimming which apartments and sick homes to crash in on the sharing-is-caring site even before knocking on Hilton’s door.
Soon you might be able to turn to Airbnb for even more when it comes to planning your next vacay — the site is experimenting with letting you book “custom experiences for curious travelers.” These San Francisco (for now)-based activities are organized into categories like Explore and Learn, Food and Drinks, Sightseeing and Outdoors and offer things to do around town with local pros as guides.
Self-proclaimed beer snob Ian will give you a “carefully curated” Beer & Pub Grub Lover’s Tour for $45 per person including beer, food pairings and all that insider brew knowledge. For $20, tour owner Pam will take you around the Haight-Ashbury ‘hood on a psychedelic 2.5 hour walking tour following in the footsteps of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Go outdoors on a $45 urban hike with city skipper Alexandra or cough up $175 to surf at Stinson Beach with personal trainer Nicki.
Airbnb hasn’t made an official statement about the “experiences” experiment — for now the page is not featured anywhere on the site and you can’t list a personal pub crawl like you can your dwelling just yet. It looks like the experts and experiences were hand-picked, and those posting got help with photos and descriptions for their listing, so we assume this is a test to see how well something like this would works.
The concept makes sense to us — since you’re probably using Airbnb to hook you up with a place to stay on a trip that’s more pleasure than business anyway, how great would it be if you could add fun things to do, too? It’s almost like having a concierge built into the Airbnb experience. And for those of us who live in a tourist-friendly city who are just waaaay too cool to hop on one of those big buses, we could definitely see the site becoming a go-to search for locals when the ‘rents are in town.
Would you use Airbnb to schedule an “Experience”? Do you have an experience you would set up on the site? Share your thoughts below!
(h/t: TechCrunch)