After 2 years of pandemic, Airbnb is changing: what’s new for travelers?

The platform Airbnb deploys an update, and its major novelty, the “AirCover” guarantee, brings it into a new era of service.

Just weeks before summer kicks off, Airbnb is rolling out its biggest update in a decade, adding features like Categories, Split Stays, and AirCover Comprehensive Protection, intended to mitigate constraints for travelers and hosts.

AirCover, a blanket that soothes travelers

The idea matured during the pandemic. Airbnb launches AirCover, touted by the US company as “the most comprehensive protection in travel”. It is systematically included in reservations, free of charge. It is therefore quite simply the most important improvement in the platform’s customer service in the last ten years.

Four guarantees are offered to travellers, starting with the “booking protection guarantee”. This allows them, in the event that a host cancels the reservation 30 days before the stay, to reimburse them and find them comparable accommodation. The “guarantee on arrival” offers the same guarantees (reimbursement or other comparable accommodation), in the event that access to the accommodation is impossible.

Two other warranties are included as part of the AirCover program. The “Ad Accuracy Guarantee” gives any traveler three days to report an inaccuracy between the ad and the actual accommodation, to receive a refund or be offered comparable accommodation. Finally, “24-hour security assistance” offers access to trained agents, day and night, if the traveler does not feel safe in the accommodation.

This AirCover cover is integrated both in the Airbnb application and on the website.

A better “categorized” Airbnb

Available now, the categories are the other great novelty of this Airbnb version 2022. No less than 56 categories (“With a view”, “Beaches”, “Lakes”, “Under the tropics”, “Vineyards”, “Cuisines equipped”, etc.) are now offered to Airbnb customers. Their addition is intended to respond to the “laziness” of users, who do not think of looking for accommodation in places they have never heard of, even though the platform offers more than 100,000 different destinations.

Thanks to the categories, the accommodations are classified according to their style, their location or their proximity to a specific activity that the traveler wishes to carry out during their stay, which facilitates searches according to their own criteria. Airbnb uses machine learning to classify listings into different categories, including analysis of listing title, description, photo captions, and guest reviews.

Finally, Airbnb is launching what it calls “two-step stays”. The California firm noted that over the past three months, nearly 50% of nights booked on Airbnb were for trips of a week or more. Hence the creation of these stays in two stages, with a functionality that gives the possibility of organizing your stay between two accommodations. The latter appears when the traveler searches for a specific destination, and this, for 14 categories, in order to encourage him to attach a second destination to his long stay.