Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky Credits Paris Success for Fueling Global Relaunch of Experiences Business

Airbnb is charting a renewed course for its long-struggling experiences division, banking on an unexpected demographic to drive future growth: local residents. Following years of false starts, strategic pivots, and organizational recalibrations, the vacation rental giant has found a surprising catalyst for its newly overhauled experiences platform in Paris. According to CEO Brian Chesky, speaking at the Skift Global Forum, the company’s decision to hyper-focus its initial relaunch efforts on the French capital has triggered a sixfold year-over-year surge in bookings.

This momentum has emboldened the San Francisco-based tech company to export its localized playbook to major metropolitan markets like New York, with aggressive expansion plans targeting over a thousand cities worldwide. However, while the early returns are undeniably promising, industry analysts and competitors are closely watching to see whether Airbnb can sustainably achieve what few online travel agencies and experience marketplaces have managed before: convincing residents to book tourist and leisure activities within their own backyards.

A Decade of Ambition and Missteps

The journey of Airbnb Experiences has been characterized by high ambitions counterbalanced by persistent operational hurdles. When the platform was first introduced more than a decade ago, it was heralded as a revolutionary step beyond traditional accommodation. The vision was to transform everyday hosts into local tour guides, offering unique, deeply personal excursions ranging from truffle hunting in Tuscany to artisanal cooking classes in Tokyo.

For years, however, the division struggled to gain the necessary traction to justify its footprint within Airbnb’s core business model. The company historically maintained a staunch resistance to listing high-demand, mainstream commercial tours—such as skip-the-line passes to the Eiffel Tower or guided walks through the Colosseum—preferring instead to curate exclusively off-the-beaten-path activities. This ideological stance, while preserving the platform’s bohemian and peer-to-peer ethos, severely limited its total addressable market. Travelers frequently gravitated toward established legacy ticketing platforms like GetYourGuide, Viator, or Klook for major landmarks, leaving Airbnb’s experiences catalog as an auxiliary feature rather than a primary revenue driver.

Compounding these strategic friction points was the devastating disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. As global travel ground to a sudden halt, Airbnb was forced to pivot rapidly, introducing "Online Experiences" that allowed users to participate in virtual activities from their living rooms. While inventive, the digital pivot was ultimately a temporary band-aid. By the time travel restrictions eased, the physical experiences sector required a comprehensive structural overhaul. Rather than forcing immediate scaling, leadership recognized that the foundational mechanics of supply curation, quality control, and user acquisition needed to be rebuilt from the ground up.

The Paris Blueprint and the Local Phenomenon

The turning point for the modern iteration of Airbnb Experiences arrived with its official relaunch in 2025. Recognizing the systemic execution errors of the past, Chesky and his executive team made a deliberate strategic choice to abandon the scattershot approach of launching globally all at once. Instead, they adopted a hyper-localized methodology, choosing Paris as the ultimate testing ground to refine the product-market fit.

The selection of Paris was strategic, given its status as one of the most visited cities in the world and a critical market for Airbnb’s core short-term rental operations. Yet, despite initial sluggishness following the 2025 rollout, the localized focus quickly began to bear fruit. The cornerstone of this success, according to Chesky, was a behavioral shift that caught company executives completely off guard.

"One of the reasons they’re growing is we’ve now started to crack locals," Chesky stated during his keynote appearance at the Skift Global Forum. "Locals in Paris are booking experiences in Paris, something we never thought would happen, so now we’re taking that playbook to New York and other cities. And I think we’re not even close to that happening in 1,000 cities, but I think that will happen soon."

The phenomenon of residents utilizing an accommodation platform to consume leisure activities in their home city challenges conventional assumptions about travel tech usage. Traditionally, platforms like Airbnb are utilized exclusively by transient visitors seeking lodging away from home. By successfully marketing high-end workshops, culinary masterclasses, and neighborhood walking tours to the Parisian populace, Airbnb has effectively tapped into the lucrative local entertainment and weekend-activity economy—a space traditionally dominated by localized ticketing apps, event aggregators, and word-of-mouth recommendations.

Scaling the Playbook: From Manhattan to Global Metropolises

Buoyed by a reported sixfold year-over-year growth metric in Paris, Airbnb is wasting no time operationalizing its newfound insights. The New York market serves as the immediate next frontier for the expanded experiences playbook, with preparations underway to introduce similar localized marketing strategies, curated host incentives, and algorithmic adjustments designed to capture domestic and residential engagement.

The broader roadmap is exceptionally ambitious. Chesky’s vision encompasses scaling the optimized experiences model to more than one thousand cities globally. Achieving this milestone, however, requires navigating complex operational hurdles that have historically plagued the sector. Scaling experiences is notoriously difficult because, unlike standardized hotel rooms or airline seats, every tour, class, or excursion is inherently unique and difficult to standardize at scale.

To mitigate quality inconsistencies, Airbnb has adjusted its historical aversion to commercial mainstream inventory. The platform has progressively relaxed its resistance to high-demand landmark tours, recognizing that modern consumers demand a hybrid ecosystem: they want authentic, peer-to-peer cultural immersion alongside frictionless access to major global tourist attractions. By blending these two categories, Airbnb is positioning itself as a comprehensive itinerary planner rather than merely a niche marketplace for alternative sightseeing.

Industry Implications and Competitive Dynamics

The aggressive reinvigoration of Airbnb Experiences carries significant implications for the broader travel and tourism landscape. The experiences and activities sector is widely regarded as the fastest-growing segment of the global travel industry, with total market value projected to exceed hundreds of billions of dollars.

For established industry giants, Airbnb’s renewed push represents both a formidable challenge and a validation of the market’s potential. Competitors such as Booking Holdings, Expedia Group, and specialized experiences platforms like Viator and GetYourGuide have long dominated the sightseeing and activity booking space. However, very few of these platforms have successfully cracked the code of engaging local residents for everyday leisure. If Airbnb can successfully export its Parisian success to dense urban centers like New York, London, Tokyo, and beyond, it risks capturing significant market share not just from traditional travel aggregators, but also from domestic entertainment and lifestyle apps.

Furthermore, the expansion of the experiences segment aligns with Airbnb’s broader corporate strategy to diversify its revenue streams beyond traditional residential rentals. In many major global cities, short-term rental regulations have grown increasingly stringent, capping nightly counts, limiting operating days, and imposing steep licensing fees. By growing the services and experiences side of the business, Airbnb can generate sustainable transaction fees and commission revenues that are less susceptible to municipal real estate restrictions.

Economic and Community Considerations

While the financial upside for the corporation is clear, the rapid expansion of localized experiences will likely draw scrutiny from urban planners and community advocates. In destinations like Paris and New York, local residents are already sensitive to the commercialization of public spaces and neighborhood resources.

Proponents of the platform argue that empowering locals to act as experience hosts fosters community engagement, supports small-scale entrepreneurs, and distributes economic benefits beyond traditional tourist hubs into residential neighborhoods. By encouraging residents to participate as both consumers and creators within the platform, Airbnb is attempting to weave itself more deeply into the fabric of daily urban life, rather than operating solely as a transient hospitality service.

Critics, however, will monitor whether an influx of platform-driven activities contributes to localized overcrowding, increased competition for unique cultural spaces, or inflationary pressures on local recreational pricing. The success of the strategy will ultimately depend on whether Airbnb can maintain a delicate balance between commercial scalability and community preservation.

Looking Ahead

As Airbnb prepares to roll out its refined experiences framework across international markets throughout the remainder of the decade, the stakes remain high. The initial skepticism that greeted the platform’s early iterations has been replaced by cautious optimism, driven by measurable financial growth and an unexpected behavioral breakthrough in France.

The central question facing Brian Chesky and his executive team is no longer whether consumers will book unique activities, but whether the "Paris playbook" can be successfully replicated in vastly different cultural and economic landscapes. If Airbnb can sustain its current trajectory and genuinely capture the local leisure market across a thousand cities, the experiences division may finally fulfill its long-held promise of becoming the second major pillar of the company’s global empire.