108 - Airbnb 2025: What stood out
So Airbnb released Experience (again?), but they also announced some other things which I found quite interest. Unwinding AI. Loyalty utopias. Jaguar's re-brand failure continues.
Hello,
Last week I received a print magazine from HospitalityOn where they published my article about the PMS wars. There’s something special with paper magazines. Somehow just feels less temporary.
Best, Martin
Sponsored by Klairhaus. Support the newsletter, treat someone to great office gadgets.
Moving from AI back to humans
Klarna famously moved a lot of their customer support to AI, talking about becoming an AI first company and reducing workforce dramatically. But they’re unwinding the AI support to bring humans back in. AI can handle the average support tasks. But it is the edge cases that make the most problems and it is also those that AI struggles with. Where a human will be better. Booking a family trip in a hotel often ends up with emails and phone calls. Because AI just can’t deal with it. We’re not going to AI our way out of all problems. We need to find the right ones.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
Business travel and Leisure
There’s a shift in the U.S. hotel industry towards leisure travel as business travel declines. I’m going to assume this is coming more from uncertainties in the global trade environment than anything else. Yes there’s a facility to do remote meetings, but there’s also a need to meet in person. I personally believe the trend is temporary, but that’s just a hunch.
LODGING INDUSTRY TRENDS
About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies helping turn them into industry leaders. I'm also the co-founder of 10minutes.news a hotel news media that is unsensational, factual and keeps hoteliers updated on the industry. Loyalty, points, utopias
Every time someone talks about loyalty systems I get a little curious. The truth is other that the biggest improvement in loyalty was Amazon Prime. The rest of the systems are all a rewards system that cost the company money to get customers to come back. Saying that people don’t want points, they want experiences is two different discussions. Reality is if you give people money (points) and status to stay at your hotel they’ll return.
MORE ON LOYALTY
Designing hotels
Hotel designs are often super focused on the interior design - the wow factors - and space optimization (revenue). While the designers are inventing the experience often bringing in lighting experts and other sensory experts. It rarely considers the tech side. Which is where the whole thing collapses. Coming in to a great hotel for a stay that will cost most people’s monthly wage - and being met with tech problems is properly annoying. “The system is down” problems were acceptable excuses in the 90s when computers were rare. We all have many of those things now. Here are some of the design trends in hotels.
HOTEL DESIGN TRENDS
Jaguar copies nothing
A while ago I wrote about the obsession in marketing of “being different” it is a weird virus that catches on in some meeting rooms. Jaguar just proved that theory again. Their copy nothing campaign was all about being different. The problem is now they are so different nobody knows what they are and do, do they still make cars? Marketing is about being as similar as possible to something, not as different as can be. We’re in the business of associating products, desires and ideas together.
THE AD AGENCY
Walled gardens and digital ads
The latest report on the state of digital advertising highlights the ongoing battle between Walled Gardens like Meta and Google and the Open Internet. There’s a problem here that is comfort versus monopoly. The point is it is much easier to have 1-2 platforms to manage ads on rather than a dozen that each require unique learnings. But it leads to monopolies. The rise of "Challenger Gardens" like TikTok and LinkedIn shows that there is still room for more but we naturally tend to want less (until we dont).
DIGITAL ADVERTISING ADVERTISING DOMINANCE
Podcast: I was invited on the Hospitality Daily Podcast and spoke about technology in hospitality, some thoughts on what wont change in hospitality, and why I co-founded 10minutes.news. Best, MartinOpinion
Airbnb’s Summer 2025 release: 2 things that caught my attention
Everyone has opinions on Airbnb’s summer release. And I have been asked for mine a few times. So here’s my take, and I’ll stick to the two things that stood out to me. They’re not what you think.
First, the design. Airbnb has always been a design-forward company. In fact, they’ve invented some of the animation tech that now runs across the web. And now, they’ve brought back skeuomorphism (design that mimics real-world textures and forms), a design style that Jony Ive killed in 2013. It’s a small thing to change, but in the design community it changes everything (look forward to getting a new website proposal). I like it because it adds some flavor to the design. As Jobs once said about the button design on Macs “We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them.”
Airbnb are usually ahead of the design curve. Much like Apple sparked the flat design wave a decade ago, this could very well spark a return to richer, more textured interfaces. Design always swings like a pendulum. It’s time to come back to something with character (and for the hotel industry that’s pretty good).
The second point that stood out is even more important: they’re still trying. Airbnb continues to release new things. Some might be successful, often they aren’t. And I love that. Public companies, by default, tend to optimize. They focus on what works, tweak around the edges, and squeeze out incremental growth. Booking is a great example, hyper focused on performance and efficiency. And it works for them. But Airbnb? They launch, iterate, fail, and then do it all over again. How many times have they launched experiences?
That spirit of experimentation is rarer than we think. Most of their ideas don’t take off, but that’s not the point. They’re one of the few public companies that still behave like a startup, with the kind of (mini) moon-shot ideas we typically associate with founders in their garage.
Their return to experiences and gig-economy services (they’re essentially a gig-economy company) may or may not succeed. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that they’re still innovating. And, if the hospitality tech world needs anything right now, it’s this: the guts to experiment again.
Whether you’re a hotel brand, a startup, or a travel tech company—make something new. It might not work. That’s okay. Do it anyway.
PS: Big bet on redefining what it means “to Airbnb” - according to Gemini it currently means to list, offer, or rent out a property (such as a house, apartment, or room) for short-term stays through the Airbnb platform. Redefining it to mean doing some unspecified activity on Airbnb platform is a long shot. But with the right ad budget any word can be redefined.
Particularly excellent edition of Tell this week Martin. Big thanks overall. Michael Cohen