Airbnb’s redesign makes it much easier to find rentals for long-term stays and multi-stop trips

Airbnb is opening up the world of travel even further with the company’s biggest update in a decade, which increases choices by 40% for travelers looking for stays of at least a week using a new technology called Split Stays, and also introduces inventive categories and more insurance coverage.

“We have the biggest travel bounce of the century ahead of us and I hope that when people check out our website or our new app, they’ll be reminded that there’s this really big world out there just waiting to be discovered – a world of possibilities,” said the CEO. said Brian Chesky. “You can live like a king in a castle and like a child in a treehouse or you can be like an explorer on a ship. If you love design, you can sleep in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, like I Did it in Ann Arbor, Michigan a month ago.

The revamp kicked off this morning with Split Stays, which combines two home rentals into back-to-back stays, creating an itinerary that can be built around location or theme.

Previously, listings only appeared in search if they were available for an entire stay, a particular issue for long stays of a week or more, which account for more than half of Airbnb guest stays in the country. course of the last three months. The new feature nearly doubles the search options by automatically pairing two lists that together will populate the search parameters.

What the team discovered while testing Split Stays was the ability to create itineraries based on themes. For example, if you’re looking for a National Parks-themed getaway, you might find two homes in the National Parks area back to back instead of one. “What makes it so revolutionary is not what it is today, but what it can be,” Chesky says. “This represents the opportunity for Airbnb to begin creating personalized itineraries with machine learning, artificial intelligence, and personalized curation.”

Accordingly, the launch also includes 56 new themed categories, which include accommodation types such as A-frames, cabins, castles, mud houses, houseboats, treehouses, windmills and yurts; activity categories such as golf, surfing and skiing; and types of places like beaches, cities, Moroccan riads and Italian trulli. There’s even a category for creative spaces that includes recording studios and green-screen sound stages, as well as houses with grand pianos. Of the 6 million listings on the platform, 4.4 million unique homes are now in one category, and some in more than one.

Categories also offer additional and personalized data. For example, if you search in the design category, each listing will have a descriptor indicating who the designer is, but if it is national parks, the same line will detail the park it is close to.

Perhaps the most notable category is one of Chesky’s favorites, simply titled “OMG!” with a spaceship logo. There’s no other way to describe it than “I can’t believe this exists,” he says, pointing to a zigzag house in costa rica and one yellow submarine in new zealand as examples.