A look at Airbnb's efforts to profit from a consumer culture that values experiences with locals, simultaneously personalizing and commoditizing food activities
As people begin to value “things” less and “doing stuff” more, Airbnb has simultaneously personalized and commoditized the food-related experience Tweets: @eater , @eater , @eater , @lennyice , @p_brady , and @curbed Tweets: @eater : Airbnb didn't invent the concept of selling specialized activities, but it has more scale than sites like Vayable, Eatwith, and TakeMeTour, and it can go head to head with online travel agency behemoths like TripAdvisor and Expedia https://www.eater.com/... @eater : Travelers are shelling out more money on things to do than on car rentals, train tickets, or cruises combined. Of those activities, eating and drinking are the most prized. https://www.eater.com/... @eater : As people begin to value “things” less and “doing stuff” more, Airbnb has simultaneously personalized and commoditized the food-related experience https://www.eater.com/... https://twitter.com/... Paul Barnes / @lennyice : As Shopify's COO says: “when you sell on a marketplace, you effectively are renting customers from that marketplace...In some cases, the marketplaces are not always on the side of merchants.” (https://www.barrons.com/...) Who will arm the Experience rebels? (https://www.eater.com/...) https://twitter.com/... Paul Brady / @p_brady : The weird, sort-of profitable, always-on, hard-to-figure-out world of Airbnb Experiences: https://www.eater.com/... via @Eater and @deannating @curbed : Today, there are more than 40,000 Airbnb Experiences to choose from in 1,000 cities. https://www.eater.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2019 Eater analysis sits mid-arc in Airbnb's long attempt to sell not just places to stay but things to do. The company had already been running experimental hospitality through its Samara innovation lab since 2016, and its experiences push — scaled to 40,000+ listings across 1,000 cities — put it head to head with specialists like Vayable, Eatwith, and TakeMeTour, plus OTA giants TripAdvisor and Expedia.
The timing matters because traveler spend was already rotating toward activities over car rentals, train tickets, or cruises, with eating and drinking the most prized category. Airbnb also hedged culturally, leading a $20M round into Atlas Obscura (its trips-and-experiences play) while critics tracked how the same platform had reshaped neighborhoods like Barcelona through short-term stays.
First-order effects
- Specialist activity platforms lose their differentiation: Airbnb brings more scale to the same local-meal-and-tour inventory than Vayable, Eatwith, or TakeMeTour can match.
- Hosts gain a new revenue line beyond lodging — a dinner or market walk becomes bookable inventory priced and distributed by the platform, which takes a cut of an encounter that previously had no intermediary at all.
Second-order effects
- TripAdvisor and Expedia are forced to treat activities as a core booking category rather than an add-on, competing on the same 'things to do' spend that now outranks transport products.
- Local experience supply starts organizing itself around the platform's standards — hosts design offerings to be discoverable and reviewable, which standardizes what was pitched as intimate and unrepeatable.
Third-order effects
- Commoditizing personal experience proves harder than commoditizing beds: by the 2020s Airbnb had cycled through relaunches — the Icons celebrity-venue category in 2024 and Brian Chesky's push to make Airbnb a [[a:885688|storefront for real-world services after the original 2016 experiences experiment fell short]].
- If the pattern holds, hospitality platforms consolidate around whoever controls distribution of local life itself — with regulators already primed by the housing-market conflicts Airbnb sparked in cities like Barcelona to scrutinize the next layer of commercialized neighborhood activity.
The trend: Travel platforms are absorbing local experience supply — converting meals, tours, and encounters into standardized bookable inventory, then iterating on the format when the commoditization doesn't stick.