Less than one month after launching its pop-culture alignedexclusive Icons experiences in partnership with companies such as Disney, Pixarand Marvel, Airbnb has alerted about 5,000 tour and experience operatorsaround the world that their experiences are being pulled from the platform.
“We’ve made the difficult decision to remove your Experiencefrom Airbnb,” Airbnb wrote in an email sent to the affected operators onFriday.
In a statement sent to Phocuswire, Airbnb said, “We regularly evaluate Experiences based on the host’s expertise, the activity’s uniqueness and local relevance, and guests’ ratings and reviews and remove those that continue to provide low quality experiences.”
In the email to operators, Airbnb said it removed experiences that do not “meet our standards.”
Airbnb will remove these listings on June 20, andreservations for June 20 and beyond will be canceled and refunds sent to guests. PhocusWire has contacted Airbnb for more details on this decision and will update this story as necessary.
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In the Tourpreneur Facebook group, dozens of operatorsexpressed shock at receiving the news.
“They are removing my experiences which had the most highestrating on Airbnb. I have no idea why they are doing so… I am sad because I wasgetting [a] good amount of bookings through Airbnb,” wrote Shwetank Tripathi, anIndia-based operator who received the notice that his walking tour is beingremoved. Tripathi has listed on Airbnb since 2019 and also provides a foodtour, which is not being removed.
Operators also expressed concern in the Facebook group about losing all of the customer reviews that are part of their Airbnb listing.
Mitch Bach, CEO of TripSchool and one of the leaders of theTourpreneur community, said he has been hearing from operators who are very upset.
“Airbnbwanted unique tours developed exclusively for their platform, establishingexclusivity rules and foregoing API connectivity that effectively tied hostsexclusively to the Experiences ecosystem. That’s a fair business decision, butit means that suddenly removing so much tour inventory has an outsized impactfor these small business owners who have come to rely sometimes solely on thissource of income,” Bach said.
“Removingthese Experience hosts from the platform via a terse DM [direct message]announcing they have three weeks’ notice to come up with a new business plan isa pretty poor taste, I’m sorry to say. This is, in fact, the worst fear of manytour operators who work with OTAs - being treated not as humans and smallbusiness owners, but like a can of soup suddenly not wanted on a store’s shelfand discarded at a moment’s notice. … It’s a warning sign for any tour andactivity operator out there not to put all their eggs in one basket.”
And said Bruce Rosard, co-founder and chief commercial officer at Arival,“Unliketheir unique lodging business, Airbnb is only one distribution platform forexperiences. And since launched in 2016, they truly haven't been thatsuccessful compared to their peers. The in-destinations experiences industrykeeps expecting something great from them, but this is another example ofAirbnb letting the industry down when they have so much potential to be a greatpartner.”
A new strategy for Airbnb Experiences?
Earlier this month Airbnbunveiled its new Icons experiences - prompting mixed reaction from across the industry - and hinted the pop-culture alignedofferings are a sign of what is to come.
In the company’s call with financial analysts to discuss itsQ1 2024 financial results, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky said, “"Icons is like we’re a car companyand we’re starting with a Formula One car. And very few people can experience aFormula One car, but it captures the magic, it captures the demand. It reallyexpands the brand and increases our permission to be able to go intoexperiences, and then you kind of move down market. And one of our goals isgoing to be to bring the magic of Icons to everyone. ... We’ve really paved theway for next year.”
Airbnb first launchedits Experiences division in 2016 and for the first few years regularly talkedabout its growth strategy. Then one year ago, in April 2023, the companyannounced it was pausingsubmissions of new listings of experiences.
Airbnb isoffering operators whose listings are scheduled to be removed 30 days to appealthat decision.
*This story has been updated with a statement from Airbnb and confirmation that it removed about 5,000 experiences.
