Dive Brief:
- Airbnb began rolling out an AI customer service agent in April to handle more customer queries without human intervention, CEO Brian Chesky said on a Q1 2025 earnings call last week.
- The company plans on rolling it out to all users in the United States by the end of the month; half of U.S. users are currently using it.
- “We believe this is the best AI-supported customer travel agent in travel,” Chesky said. “It's already led to a 15% reduction in people needing to contact live human agents, and it's going to get significantly more personalized and agentic over the years to come.”
Dive Insight:
Airbnb is laser focused on perfecting its core service by making it easy to use, more affordable, and more reliable. A good user experience is key to that effort, Chesky said.
The company is trying to design a great end-to-end experience with help from AI, so travellers can book their entire trip via Airbnb and easily solve their customer service issues.
“We're really focused on customer service and solving the most difficult problems for customers and working backwards towards travel inspiration,” Chesky said. “We're going to bring more AI into the application, so that [with] Airbnb, you can really solve your own problems with great self-solve through AI customer service agents.”
Airbnb quietly rolled out the AI customer service agent ahead of schedule. The company had planned on rolling out AI-powered customer support as part of its summer release, Chesky said on a fourth quarter 2024 earnings call. He also said Airbnb would focus on customer service AI use cases.
“AI can do an incredible job of customer service, [it] can speak every language 24/7. It can read a corpus of thousands of pages of documents,” Chesky said then. “And so we're starting with customer support. And over the coming years, what we're going to do is we're going to take that AI-powered customer service agent and we're going to bring it into essentially Airbnb search to eventually graduate to be a travel and living concierge.”
The company has spent the last few years rolling out hundreds of upgrades to improve the Airbnb experience for guests and hosts. One of those upgrades, Guest Favorites, makes it easier to find places to stay on Airbnb. Customers have booked more than 350 million nights since its launch in November 2023.
The company recently redesigned its Rare Find feature to better highlight popular high-quality listings and simplified its checkout page to make booking easier.
In response to customer feedback that they wanted more price transparency, Airbnb introduced a toggle that allows travelers to see the total price upfront. More than 17 million guests have used that feature in the past two years, and in April, the company rolled out “total price display” globally, so the price displayed in the beginning includes all fees.
To improve reliability, the company removed 450,000 listings. “This has created a lot higher customer satisfaction, reduced customer service tickets,” Chesky said.
“For every person who books an Airbnb, we estimate about nine people are booking hotels,” Chesky said. “So, if we could just get one of those nine people to book an Airbnb, that essentially would double the size of our business. And the No. 1 reason people say they don't use an Airbnb is they don't find it historically as reliable as a hotel. That's why we're really trying to elevate the best homes in Airbnb and remove the worst.”
Revenue for the quarter increased 6% year over year to $2.3 billion, according to a company earnings report. Net income for the quarter, however, fell to $154 million — down from $264 million a year ago, which the company attributed to “increased headcount, write-downs of certain investments in privately-held companies and lower interest income.”
