Disruptive tech company Airbnb is expanding beyond accommodation and now allows users to book experiences and plan whole trips through the app, taking on traditional travel agencies.
Airbnb lets travellers skip traditional hotel-booking and stay in people's homes around the world, dealing directly with the home-owner.
The new product, Trips, was launched this week and Cape Town is one of the first of 12 cities globally to have it.
Trips aims to bring together where users stay, what they do, and the people they meet while travelling, into one platform. Airbnb says it will be a people-powered platform, doing away with the 'middle man' like travel agents or tour organisers.
At launch there were three sections to the new service: experiences, places and homes, with flights and services to be added in the future.
Hosts or tour guides will be able to upload an 'experience' to the site that travellers can book. For example, violin-making in Paris or marathon-running in Kenya.
Trips launched with around 500 experiences in the 12 cities worldwide, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Detroit, Havana, London, Paris, Florence, Nairobi, Cape Town, Tokyo and Seoul.
Hosts from these cities and another 39 can from this week request to list an experience.
The 'places' section of Trips allows travellers to browse through recommendations and insights from locals. This is meant to give users options beyond the typical tourist 'traps'.
This section also includes guidebooks, audio walking tours, meet-ups and local event listings.
To bring it altogether, there is a new feature called Trip Itinerary, which allows users to book everything ? experiences and accommodation ? at one time, with the option to add or remove things at a later stage.
"Over time, this capability will evolve based on machine learning to dynamically suggest personalised and contextual ? ie, based on location ? recommendations during a trip. Airbnb's vision is to ultimately cater for every aspect of a trip," says Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky.
The company also recently made a play for business travel by integrating its service with business travel agents.
The new initiative, Airbnb for Business, aims to provide travelling business people with a 'home away from home'. All the Airbnb business listings available have upgraded their services and amenities to accommodate corporate travel.
Airbnb was founded in San Francisco in 2008 and now has millions of listings in over 35 000 cities in nearly 200 countries. It makes money by taking 13% of all payments; however, hosts come up with their own price - based on what they feel is appropriate. The company will follow a similar approach with experiences.
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