Dive Brief:
- Airbnb’s customer support cost per booking has declined more than 17% year over year, “driven in large part by improvements to our AI assistant,” co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky said on a Q3 2026 earnings call last week.
- A year and half since launching its AI assistant for customer support, the travel booking company is expanding its AI assistant to voice support in the U.S. to provide guests faster help over the phone. The company said it has resolved approximately 40% of all customer support issues without human agents in the third quarter.
- “And if you're wondering, customer service NPS is as high as it's ever been,” Chesky said on the call. “But these improvements are just the beginning.”
Dive Insight:
While Airbnb is touting the success of its customer support AI assistant, it sees itself as an “AI-native” company, and it isn’t sitting on its haunches. Airbnb plans to launch an AI travel assistant that will touch on all parts of the travel experience.
That AI agent will not be limited to Airbnb’s platform and will launch in the first half of 2027, Chesky said.
While Meta’s AI assistant Muse and Spear Street Technology’s personal AI assistant Instinct have made headlines recently, Chesky doesn’t expect people to use one AI agent for everything.
“You see today's AI agents like Muse and Instinct are good at simple routine tasks like making a restaurant reservation or scheduling an appointment. But planning a trip is different. Travel is aspirational. Discovering where to go and where to stay is part of the experience,” Chesky said. “And I don't think the general purpose agents are the best to do that. So that is why we are building our own AI agent.”
Chesky outlined three advantages for Airbnb: It has 20 years of experience and deep knowledge of the Airbnb marketplace; it is already part of the reservation, payment and customer support experience, which an outside agent cannot easily do; and Airbnb is building a new interface specifically for travel.
Instead of using a traditional chat interface, Airbnb is developing a “custom-designed, AI-native experience to respond to what guests are looking for,” Chesky said.
Airbnb’s agent, he said, “draws from a library of hundreds of travel-specific interface components, maps, photos, comparisons, calendars, itineraries and composes them in real time to match what they're looking for.”
