The Airbnb Experience deal with Tripadvisor Viator explained in Screenshots

**Thibault Masson** (0:00)
Two weeks before Airbnb announced its big experiences deal as a theater, I was on holiday in France on vacation, if you're in the US, staying in three Airbnb's back to back. And I took a screenshot of every single screen where Airbnb tried to send me something, an experience, a service, anything.
I'm not sure I've seen many of these screenshots, right? And what they show is really simple. Airbnb has built a fantastic machine for cross-selling services and experiences, but it may not actually have much to sell. This in one line is the whole Viator deal. I can show it to you in six screens. Let me show you my screen.

**Thibault Masson** (0:46)
Welcome to RSU by Pricelapse Weekly Podcast. Subscribe now. So this is my Airbnb homepage logged in, and I want you to look at the bottom row with me. There's rent a car and earn 20% in Airbnb credit, and right next to it, read this one carefully, get 15% of luggage storage in La Petite Pierre.
Now, I never searched for La Petite Pierre. That's the village where I actually had a booking, a few hundred people, deep in Alsace. So Airbnb isn't guessing what I might like here. It's selling against my reservation. It knows where I'm going, it knows the dates, and it starts selling from the moment I book, which is days before many property manager would even send their pre-arrival email. That's the machine, and it gets better on the next screen.
Here we're in the mobile app in French, and this is my trip page for La Petite Pierre, the page you'd normally open just to find out what time you can check in. Follow my cursor down the page with me. First, there's my reservation, and then look at what comes next before anything else. Rent a car, book a private transfer, store your bags, three paid offers stacked up, and only then down here do I finally get arrive after 4 p.m. and depart before 11
So, Airbnb has placed a whole row of paid offers above my check-in time, between me and the one piece of information I opened the page for. And think for a second about what that spot is worth. Because Airbnb knows I've paid, it knows my address, my dates, how many of us there are, and it knows my Sunday is completely empty, you can see it right here. Two lines and a big hole in the middle. No search engine and no email campaign ever reaches a traveler in that state. This is the best placed sales spot in all of online travel, which raises the obvious question, what has Airbnb actually got to sell in it?
Well, here's the store. Services pour votre voyage, services for your trip, and let's just count them together. Photography, two providers. Chefs' Prevays, one. Massage, one. Maquillage, one, and that's it. Four categories and five providers for my entire stay.
This isn't a mock-up, it's the real page of a real booking, in August, in the middle of peak season. Then, just below, the experiences. A tour of Strasbourg from 30 euros, a tasting of six wines from 19 euros, a seller visit from 55 euros. All three perfectly real, perfectly nice, and all three about an hour's drive from the house. So this is the best-sale spot in online travel, and that is everything sitting on the shelf.
And it isn't just my little village either. This is the Explore tab for Gérardme, the lake town where I'd spent the week before, and you can see that experiences and services now sit right in the main navigation, next to homes. Airbnb has given them the front of the store. And what's filling that front window? Three generic category tiles, and the same car rental card that's been following me from screen to screen. Now, Airbnb has been building experiences by hand since 2016 And I say this with real sympathy, because everyone in our industry knows this kind of supply is brutally hard to scale. But the result, in August, in one of the most touristy corners of France, is what you're looking at. And just as an aside, the app even offered me apartments in Colmar for nights it had already sold me. So the machine is being shipped fast, but the supply clearly isn't keeping up.
And that is exactly why, when you hear the deal, it makes complete sense.
On August 11th, Tripadvisor announced that a selection of Viator tours would become bookable on Airbnb. And Viator has around 425,000 experiences in its catalogue. Remember My Shelf, 5 Providers and 3 tours an hour away? That's the gap being filled. And honestly, it's a fair trade on both sides, because Airbnb has the sales spot but not enough to put in it, while Viator has the products and always wants more places to sell them. It already resells through booking.com and plenty of others. Its experiences profit actually dropped last quarter even as revenue grew, so a brand new sales channel that costs it nothing in marketing is an easy yes.