Airbnb has officially re-entered the experiences space, and this isn’t something hotels should ignore.
While hotels may still lead the way when it comes to onsite service and guest experience, Airbnb’s ambition is clear: to become the go-to platform for everything travel-related – from accommodation to activities, services and curated moments. This has direct implications for hotels, particularly those who rely on experiences as a source of ancillary revenue, brand differentiation and guest engagement.
So what makes this different from Airbnb’s previous attempts – and what should hotels be doing in response?
A brief history of Airbnb Experiences
Airbnb first launched Experiences in 2016. At the time, the aim was to evolve beyond lodging into a full-service travel platform – where you could book a place to stay and join a ceramics class, a market tour, or a local food experience with just a few clicks.
It sounded promising. By 2019, the platform had over 40,000 experiences in 1,000+ cities. But cracks were already showing – from inconsistent quality and lack of vetting to hosts who struggled to scale or market themselves effectively. The pandemic hit pause on in-person experiences, and in 2023 Airbnb stopped accepting new submissions altogether, admitting the product wasn’t meeting its own standards.
Fast forward to 2025: Airbnb is relaunching Experiences – and this time, it’s different.
Why this time Is different
This relaunch reflects a full strategic shift. Airbnb has:
- Rebuilt the product experience: Experiences are now integrated seamlessly into the core app and booking flow, appearing at the time of accommodation booking and personalised by location.
- Tightened supply: The open call to creators is gone. Instead, Airbnb is focusing on a curated, vetted selection of premium experiences.
- Invested heavily in marketing: From celebrity partnerships to full-funnel advertising campaigns, Airbnb is spending big to make Experiences a household behaviour.
- Positioned itself as a lifestyle brand: This isn’t about just booking a massage and going on your way. It’s about belonging, identity, and aspiration. In short, Airbnb is tapping into the same emotional levers that hospitality brands rely on.
Hotels can no longer afford to treat experiences as add-ons or afterthoughts. This is now a competitive category – and Airbnb is playing to win.
What this means for hotels
For a long time, we’ve been talking about how guests value experiences more than ever. For instance, Mastercard reports that spending on experiences and nightlife now makes up 12% of global tourism sales, the highest figure in at least five years. Meanwhile, Gen Z travellers are fueling demand: a recent study found 68% prefer adventure-based holidays – like hiking, cooking, and cultural immersion – over traditional sightseeing. Simply put, if you’re not actively selling experiences as a hotel, you’re missing out on a major revenue stream.
In competing with AirBnb, hotels have a natural advantage – they already have the infrastructure, the brand, the staff and the trust. But to stay competitive, hotel brands need to:
- Design experiences that are intentional, scalable, and aligned with their brand
- Ensure those experiences are visible and bookable before a guest arrives
- Create marketing content that builds emotional anticipation and desire
- Track performance and continuously optimise how experiences are presented and sold
In short, you need to treat experiences like a product – not a perk.
Marketing experiences: what best practice actually looks like
Let’s break this down into the core components of an effective hotel experience marketing strategy:
1. Start early: build anticipation before check-in
The biggest mistake hotels make is waiting until a guest arrives to promote experiences. By then, the emotional decision-making window has passed. Instead, think about how and where a guest first interacts with your brand:
- Website: Your experiences should live alongside your rooms, not buried in a separate page or blog post. Give them equal visual weight and clear CTAs.
- Booking engine: Add upsell prompts that showcase experiences in context.
- Email marketing: Use pre-stay campaigns to introduce curated moments that align with guest motivations (e.g., couples, families, solo travellers).
- Social media: Create brand storytelling content around experiences – the goal is emotional resonance beyond the initial visual appeal. Optimise Instagram and TikTok content for SEO/GEO.
- Paid ads: Target visually appealing, emotive ads which place your target market at the heart of the content and segment by country/behaviour/interests.
If you want someone to book an experience, you need to plant the seed well before they arrive.
2. Align experiences with brand and guest profiles
Great experiences are an extension of your brand promise. A cookie-cutter wine tasting doesn’t cut it if you’re a boutique hotel with a sustainability ethos. Instead, offer a local, low-waste vineyard partnership with storytelling baked in.
Ask yourself:
- What do our guests value?
- What stories can only we tell?
- How can we make this feel emotionally meaningful – not just convenient?
The best experiences reinforce your positioning and deepen the connection between brand and guest.
3. Create shareable, people-first content
Airbnb’s relaunch is content-led for a reason: people buy what they can see themselves in.
Your job is to:
- Create emotional, story-driven content featuring real people having real moments
- Share guest-generated content and incentivise sharing with subtle nudges (e.g. branded photo props, in-room prompts)
- Focus on ‘showing, not selling’ – let the moment speak for itself and the sales will come
- Optimise your content and captions to reflect terms your target users will be searching and hit platform discovery patterns
Deliver experiences well, and you’ll drive valuable user-generated content which can then be used as social proof. And it starts with designing experiences that feel worth sharing.
4. Prioritise mobile UX and seamless booking
Booking an experience should be as easy as booking a room. That means no PDFs, long-winded forms or email chains. Here’s what good looks like:
- One-click booking from your site or confirmation email
- Clear availability, pricing, and what’s included
- Fully mobile-optimised layouts with thumb-friendly navigation
The more seamless the experience, the higher the conversion rate. Friction kills momentum.
5. Track performance like you would any other revenue stream
You can’t manage what you don’t measure, so you’re going to want to track:
- Engagement with experience-related content
- Click-through and conversion rates from marketing channels
- Booking volume and spend by guest type
- UGC frequency and share rate
- Post-stay NPS or feedback linked to specific experiences
And importantly: act on it. Optimise the wording, visuals, timing and placement based on what works. Treat experiences like a campaign that evolves – not a static offering.
Don’t copy Airbnb – do better
Airbnb’s push into experiences is slick, well-funded, and increasingly well-executed. But that doesn’t mean hotels are at a disadvantage. In fact, the opposite is true.
You have what Airbnb doesn’t: control over space, service, and environment. You know your guests better. You see them face-to-face. You’ve built trust over time.
What’s needed now is strategic focus – to craft, position and market experiences that reflect your unique DNA and drive emotional and commercial value.
Stay the Night helps hotels do exactly that – blending creativity, brand strategy and digital expertise to turn guest experiences into real revenue and long-term loyalty. So if you’re looking for support then feel free to reach out and see how we can help you.
If you want to stay ahead of the game, now’s the time to start.
