Airbnb's Experiences Turnaround Started With a Simple Insight: Locals Book Too

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky told Skift Global Forum 2026 that the company's relaunched Experiences business found its breakthrough in an unexpected place: locals.

Paris bookings for Airbnb Experiences are up sixfold year over year, and Chesky says the reason wasn't tourist demand. "Locals in Paris are booking experiences in Paris," he said, calling it a result the company didn't fully expect when it relaunched the category. Rather than roll the product out everywhere at once, Airbnb deliberately concentrated on getting Paris right first, with New York next and a stated ambition to eventually reach 1,000 cities using the same city-by-city, locals-included approach.

That's a real departure from how the rest of the experiences category operates. Competing platforms like Viator and GetYourGuide have largely built their businesses around tourists, who book under time pressure and typically spend more per transaction than a local booking a weekend activity near home. Marketing to residents instead of visitors is, in Chesky's framing, an unconventional move in an industry built around the opposite instinct.

It's also not a strategy that's worked for everyone who's tried it. Accor previously ran a locals-focused service called Accor Local and shut it down after hotel managers showed little interest in supporting it. Arival co-founder Alex Kremer argues Airbnb has structural advantages Accor didn't: "its brand is moving beyond homes and its customer acquisition costs are far lower," giving Airbnb more room to experiment with a strategy that takes time to pay off. Supply is scaling to match the ambition, with Airbnb reporting experience listings up nearly 80% year over year in the second quarter.

Read with some caution

The sixfold Paris growth figure comes from Chesky himself, at a conference, with no independent numbers to check it against, and "sixfold" from what base isn't specified, a fast-growing but still-small business can post large percentage gains without becoming a material revenue line yet. The 1,000-city ambition is also a stated goal, not a timeline Airbnb has committed to publicly with dates attached.

What it means for operators

This matters most directly for local experience and activity providers, tour guides, cooking classes, workshops, who've historically had little reason to list on a platform built around inbound tourists. If Airbnb genuinely builds a market for locals booking experiences near home, it opens a second demand channel that Viator and GetYourGuide aren't competing for. For hotels and short-term rental operators, it's a smaller but real signal: Airbnb is trying to make itself relevant to guests even when they aren't traveling, which is one more way the company is working to keep users inside its ecosystem between trips rather than just during them.