Product design question
How would you design "Airbnb Experience" inside the app?
- Airbnb
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Product design for a marketplace feature with trust, quality, and discovery challenges specific to experiential, not physical, inventory.
How to approach it
- Clarify scope, whether the focus is discovery, booking, or host-side supply for Airbnb Experiences, and confirm the target user, travelers versus local hosts.
- List pain points: difficulty finding trustworthy, high-quality experiences amid variable host quality, and low visibility into experiences relevant to a traveler's specific trip and interests.
- Consider the host side too, since low awareness or difficulty becoming a host limits supply, especially in markets with few listed experiences.
- Propose the design: a discovery surface integrated with a traveler's existing Airbnb stay, surfacing experiences based on trip dates, location, and inferred interests, alongside a quality signal like verified reviews.
- Prioritize discovery integration with existing stays first, since that leverages Airbnb's unique advantage of already knowing a traveler's trip context, unlike standalone experience marketplaces.
- Define success as experience booking attach rate per stay and host supply growth in underserved markets, confirming scope on whether host-side tools are included.
What a strong answer includes
- Leverages Airbnb's unique advantage explicitly, already knowing a traveler's trip dates and location, to power contextual discovery that standalone competitors like Viator cannot easily replicate.
- Addresses both sides of the marketplace, traveler discovery and host supply, rather than only the booking interface.
- Proposes a concrete mechanism, surfacing experiences at the point of booking a stay based on trip context, tied directly to Airbnb's existing data.
- Sets a measurable success metric, experience attach rate per stay, which captures the cross-sell value specific to Airbnb's model.
Common mistakes
- Designing a standalone experience marketplace with no integration into the existing stay-booking flow, missing Airbnb's actual advantage.
- Ignoring the host supply side of the marketplace entirely.
- Not defining a metric that ties the feature back to Airbnb's core stay-booking business.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you increase experience host supply in markets where there are currently very few?
- How would you ensure experience quality stays consistent across a wide range of hosts?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop