Airbnb Integrates AI Features & Customer Support Overhaul

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1:16It is representative variable, requires no minimum, and is earned on funds swept to Program Banks. Instant withdrawal subject to conditions boost up to$150 ,000. Cash account offered by Wealthfront brokerage LLC member FINRA SIPC, not a bank. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal investment advisory services provided by Wealthfront Advisors, LLC, an SEC registered investment advisor. Welcome to the podcast today. Airbnb is planning to bake AI features into their search, into their discovery, into their support. As someone that has done a lot of Airbnb in the past as a user, and I have been an Airbnb host for multiple properties before, and Jamie, who currently has a ton that he's doing actively with Airbnb, be.

1:53We wanted to cover this and give a bit of our perspective on where we think this is going, some opportunities for making money, how AI in this is going to change things around a bit. But before we do that, I wanted to tell you about our AI Hustle School community. This week, we just recorded a video all outlining a new side hustle that I have outlined how to do, which is essentially using AI to scale up an Etsy shop and sell products there. So it's probably something I will be updating people on from time to time on a specific genre that I'm making Bible verse T-shirts. And I'll update you guys on how much money it is making and exactly the strategies.

2:36But if you want to see the breakdown of how I set up the store, how I run it, how much money it makes, and all that kind of insider info on it, go check out the AI Hustle School community. There's a link in the description. It is$20 a month to get access to our community. And we have all of our side hustles and all the ways we're using AI to grow and scale our businesses. So go check that out. Okay, coming over to Airbnb. Jamie, as someone that is an Airbnb master and you're actively working on Airbnbs, what are some of the features you're most excited for that they have announced here? Yeah, so, you know, Airbnb has made lots of changes in the past year or two.

3:08You know, they're trying to adapt to, first of all, a lot of the hate they've gotten for service fees and things like that, but also how they get customers and making it more of an experience based company. So they're not just looking to book places to stay for people. They want you to have an experience there. So they kind of changed a lot of their algorithms and things to benefit properties that have more of an experience. So the more amenities you can offer, the more likely you are to get recommended on their platform. So these AI search features are kind of taking it to the next level. It sounds like they're going to be integrating them more.

3:48But one of the problems I see with Airbnb is some of the search is a little bit more, it's a little clunky right now. You have to search by what city or location you want to be, how many guests you have, things like that, and then the dates. I think where they're going with this is going to be instead of just where, when, and who, what kind of place are you looking for? Like, do you want to have, you know, I want to have a place that sleeps 15 people. I want there to be a pickleball court and a hot tub. And then it'll kind of look for properties that maybe fit what you're searching for rather than just the date and the location, if that makes sense.

4:27So I think this fits their model well. However, one thing I don't like about it as a host is that they have mentioned several different places that they may turn this into a sponsored listing type situation where you will have to pay additional on top of the already 15.5 % fee you pay them to be recommended, if you will. So I don't know, Jane, what do you think about this? Yeah, I mean, I was just on Airbnb kind of like clicking around, looking at it the old fashioned way. And I'm actually really excited. I think they're going to see a lot of competition from other companies that like, if you think about it, there's so many of these cool travel AI companies that are like super useful where you can just explain like, hey, I wanna do a trip with this many people around this time, like look for different, you know, look for different places to book, look for different flights.

5:18And because you can basically kind of just tell it a little bit about your itinerary, it can go and search for all of these different sites, filter through all of these different filters and give you like a perfect itinerary. I think Airbnb is actually gonna face a lot of competition from that specifically. Users that are drawn to how simple that is as a user experience to book a trip are going to, I think, like I can imagine Airbnb, if it doesn't have an API tied into that, if they don't specifically say they want an Airbnb, Airbnb might lose customers who otherwise, while planning their trip, would go say, okay, let me go find an Airbnb in this place.

5:51Maybe the whole trip gets planned and it's really elaborate and complex and it's on this other platform and it's going to put someone in a hotel and they're like, okay, perfect. Well, it planned everything. I'll just one click buy, you know, whether that's Expedia or Kayak or a lot of these companies that are doing that. I think if they can have the user experience seamless and frictionless enough, they will actually take customers away from Airbnb. So I think just on the search alone, Airbnb needs to do something. I just went and, you know, said where I wanted to go and what dates and how many people and on Airbnb and kind of filtered it.

6:22And then in order to get any of this sort of custom amenities like hot tub or kitchen or self check in or instant book, like there's a whole nother page of you know all of this stuff where you got to do all these toggles and you got to do all of your settings and click all these buttons and it just I mean it takes a long time I would love like Chad Speedy or anything else just be able to put in a long form like hey I'm trying to go um you know sometime next weekend or the weekend after um I am taking like five people and I would like uh you know a hot tub in a cool location somewhere near this city or maybe even this city and you know like blah blah blah like you just want to talk to and kind of throw a blob of text out and then have it give you a bunch of recommendations i think that's so much more natural i mean you're it's like it's like you're talking to a travel agent basically um and i think airbnb needs to implement that if they want to stay competitive so i think that that alone is going to be a great upgrade to the platform totally yeah i mean if you you know if you if you are looking for an experience you don't necessarily care you know exactly where it is what city it is, although that may be a factor for you.

7:25But that's why I think having a text conversation or verbal conversation with Airbnb, like you said, it'll be more like a travel agent finding you the right experience instead of just like having to scroll through hundreds of properties to find the right one. I've also heard they're going to be rolling out a feature where you can collaborate with your friends. So you can all start like basically a group chat within Airbnb and talk about which properties you like, which ones you don't. So you kind of all are choosing the place together, which is great because a lot of people do take trips with a group of friends or they're multiple family members.

8:02So it all, like you said, it does need to happen for them to stay competitive. And I think they're gonna, based on their past experience, but based on what they've done in the past, they're gonna put out a really good product, I think. A hundred percent. Yeah, Airbnb is the gold standard for product design. So I think if they can add the features, it'll be phenomenal. Here's something specifically that their CEO said in regards to who's actually getting access to this right now. So he said, AI search is live on a very small percentage of traffic right now. We're doing a lot of experimentation.

8:31Over time, we're going to be experimenting with making AI search more conversational, integrating it with more than the trip. And eventually, we'll be looking at sponsor listings as a result of that. Something else that I thought was interesting is they actually just recently got a new CTO over OpenAI. They hired Ahmed Al-Dahl. He was working at Meta's Llama and training their model previously. So they pulled him over. He's got a ton of experience in actual AI models. I think this is cool because if Airbnb can make any sort of custom AI in-house, like they have so much data for how these trips are being booked.

9:04I think they're a perfect person. So they have a new CTO that I think might do some really cool things there. The one other thing that I think they're doing well for AI, using AI is in just customer support. If anyone has used Airbnb, you know that, well, 90 % of the time it's phenomenal. 10 % of the time you can have issues. I mean, that's probably like a hotel too. But either as a user or as a host, you can have issues where someone comes and they trash your place. Or maybe you're a guest and you go somewhere and the Airbnb listing ends up being like super dirty or bad, right? So like you can have either of those two experiences.

9:38And usually they're mitigated by having reviews on both hosts and guests. and so you can pick your poison. If you choose to host someone that has a terrible review, you know what you're getting yourself into or if you choose to go to an Airbnb that has bad reviews, you know what you're getting yourself into. But either way, there are issues and they have decided to tackle a lot of those with AI for their customer support. Now, I'm actually a big fan of AI for customer support assuming it has the ability to issue refunds and do things and actually work through and resolve and come to resolutions.

10:09This is what blew me away though. So they said, this is their CEO again, he said, a year from now, if we're successful, significantly more than 30 % of tickets will be handled by a custom service agent in many more languages. In all the languages where we have live agents, AI customer service will not only be chat, it will be voice. And then they said that they're going to be increasing AI usage internally. 80 % of their engineers are using AI. The goal is to get it to 100%. So yeah, I think Airbnb is doing great right now. They're trying to get 30 % of all of their customer. So like basically a third of all of their customer support is just handled by AI chatbots.

10:48I've used a bunch of companies recently because I kind of have hated on this for a long time, but I've used a bunch of companies recently where I've talked to like their customer support. I could tell it's an AI chatbot. I'm like, no, I'm like, please just give me a refund for this reason, for this thing, for this reason. It's like, perfect, we should do a refund. And I'm like, the AI chatbot can do that? Great. I never want to have to wait in line for like, we'll get back to you in 12 hours with a real person. Like, sweet. If your AI agent can do everything that the normal customer support person would do, I'm thrilled with it.

11:14So I think Airbnb has taken that to heart and is going to do well on that. Yeah, absolutely. I had a situation a few months ago where someone wanted to cancel their reservation because of a family concern, a health concern, and I decided I wanted to, but I had a strict cancellation policy. so I wasn't able to without going through customer support. But if I were to be able to just chat with an AI chatbot, I'm sure it could have gotten resolved a lot faster than it did. Fortunately, I was able to still figure it out. But yeah, just to your point, moving forward, I think these chatbots are going to be actually really useful despite some of the reservations people have about them.

11:57Yeah, and I think to what everyone is saying, I do also feel like there's a trend maybe on X where people like to bag on Airbnb and are like, Hotels are so much better. Airbnb is dying. Their usage is dropping. What I will say is Airbnb's revenue was$2.78 billion in the fourth quarter. That's up 12 % from last year. Airbnb is still growing. It's still a good platform. It's still got a good place. I do find myself sometimes going to hotels. But at the end of the day, if I'm looking for a big house for my family that's really low-key and cool for a getaway, it's going to be Airbnb. be. So I think there's a lot of space for that in the market.

12:33And I hope that they continue to crush it on some of these AI features to remove any more friction or pain points that currently exist. So I think they'll do well on that. Listen, everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. We hope it was informative and insightful to you. If you learned anything new, it would really, really help out the show a ton. It would make us so happy if you could leave a rating or review if you haven't already. Drop us some stars on Apple or some stars over on Spotify. Really helps the show out to get found in the algorithm. So we appreciate that. And make sure that you go check out the AI Hustle School community to learn how to grow and scale your business using AI.

13:09We show you the revenue, the numbers, stuff we don't publish publicly anywhere else. You get access to all of that for$19 a month. Thanks so much for tuning in and we'll catch you in the next episode. It's time your hard-earned money works harder for you. With With the Wealthfront Cash Account, your uninvested cash can earn up to 3.95 % APY. That's a 0.65 % boost over an already high rate for three months, just for being a new client. Plus free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts. Start today at Wealthfront.com. 3.3 % base APY via Program Banks as of January 30th, 2026. It is representative variable, requires no minimum, and is earned on funds swept to Program Banks.

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