Challenge

Airbnb struggled to grow revenue of its Experiences business because finding new tour and activity operators was expensive and labor intensive. 

To grow, Airbnb needed an innovative and cost-effective way to dramatically increase the supply of hosts offering tours, excursions, and activities.

Solution

• Led a team that created a patented AI/ML lead generation engine to rapidly find and vet businesses that offer tours, excursions, and activities.

• Built custom web-based AI sensors that automatically evaluated millions of businesses and surfaced only the best possible leads.

• Creatively leveraged advanced AI techniques like zero-shot text classification, regression + classification, web sensing, and identity resolution.

• Conducted market research to prioritize destinations and types of activities.

• Advised clients on how to onboard small businesses to become hosts.

Impact

• Airbnb got a highly curated, fully vetted set of over 9K tour operator leads.

• 80% were high quality, on-brand, fully workable leads (industry standard is ~20%).

• AI/ML sensors enabled Airbnb to rapidly and efficiently find new hosts.

• A proven plan for how to quickly onboard new hosts to the platform.