It’s been a few years that Airbnb has been working on expanding its roots. With time it’s becoming a more robust travel companion with their full-service hospitality for high-end travelers, features like guidebooks and suggested experiences. And now it’s working on bringing more advancements in their functions.
Laura Xu, an Android engineer on Airbnb’s Trip platform, gave a brief description of introducing their new features at the company headquarters during a Tech talk.
With the co-travelers feature, Airbnb users can send invites to people who intend to join them on any trip. By using these features, one can save ideas to a master list that home, food, and drink, etc. Where each item indicates who added it to the trip and also provides a way for others to comment on the things allowing group conversations about the place or activity.
This presentation also emphasized on the fact that how Airbnb (based on size and scale) can change its platform to grow apart from home listings. The company has been providing support to coworking spaces, luxury rentals, restaurants, concerts, along with private islands and castle rentals, Xu mentioned.
Airbnb’s newer features on mobile were also the center of the discussion. Travelers can add anything to their trip guidebook with the help of these features, which links with Google Places for directions, photos, and many other details.
The Airbnb app is updated, and the company is also looking forward to offering a new trip planner, an embeddable map and a suggestions feature in addition to other features.
A new concept named Trip Platform is introduced for end-to-end trip experience on Airbnb. With tools like easy-to-reuse UI (user interface) components that can help in creating and adding new features without any difficulty.
The overall aim of this Tech talk was about building Airbnb’s iOS and Android apps because travelers aren’t generally using a desktop or laptop computer. So, there’s more input traffic on mobiles (50%). Yet Airbnb didn’t mention the launching period for its new features.