Airbnb is a company that operates an online marketplace for lodging, primarily homestays for vacation rentals, and tourism activities.
What this means, its website and app aren't its source of revenue. But regardless, in the world where COVID-19 is starting to become an endemic, the travel booking company is introducing an updated design for its website and app.
The updated design is meant to encourage the discovery of different places and facilitate longer stays.
After all, as more people are expected to travel in 2022 than the years before since COVID-19 was first declared a pandemic, Airbnb is looking forward to improve people's experience while away from home.
The company said its 2022 summer release is its biggest redesign in years.
The most prominent feature introduced in the update, is called 'Categories', which simply allows users to explore various homes around the world — rather than searching for something specific.
Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky said travel search has been the same for the last couple of decades:
What this redesign aims, is to make users browse for content, rather than just typing in dates and destinations for stays.
In other words, Airbnb wants users to explore more of what it is offering.
For starters, Airbnb is debuting 56 different Categories that include things like amazing pools, castles, and historical homes (style-based categories); arctic, beach, and lake (location-based categories); camping, golfing, and surfing (activity-based categories).
The company said that it has already categorized four million out of the six million homes listed on the platform.
To accomplish such dauting task, Chesky said that his team has used a combination of machine learning technology and human review to label the millions of homes.
Users can browse through the Categories directly from the landing page on the Airbnb website and the app.
Airbnb's Categories section is more or less, like genres in streaming apps.
With it, users can search and look for things that interest them, without having to know about specific search phrases, for example.
Chesky said that the interface is designed to handle hundreds of Categories, and that the company is planning to evolve the feature to handle even more genres whenever it sees fit.
Another update, is allowing users to see more refined categories after selecting a destination and time frame of their visit.
Not only that the contained COVID-19 has rebooted travelling, because remote working trend that started since the pandemic is here to stay.
The company said that the remote work trend has increased the number of bookings at Airbnb that are for a longer duration. The firm pointed out that in the first quarter of 2022, nearly half of all bookings had a duration of more than a week.
This is also why Airbnb is introducing split stays for trips longer than a week.
"Right now most of this product is still about homes. And most our categories I am really interested in really doubling down on experiences next year," Chesky said. "I do think a lot of people are lonely, and they want to meet people and do things."
Chesky hopes that in the years to come, Airbnb won't be just a booking platform, but a travel inspiration and discovery platform.