Airbnb unveiled the most significant development in its eighth year history as it moves beyond accommodation with the launch of Trips. Bringing together where you stay, what you do and the people you meet all in one place, Trips is a people-powered platform designed to make travel both easy and magical. Trips launched with three key areas – Experiences, Places and Homes.
In an effort to amplify how Trips will make travel magical again, we wanted to completely immerse travelers into these communities around the world.
To celebrate the launch of Experiences as part of the launch of Trips, we invited people around the world to participate Live via a 24-hour Facebook Live feed named We Are Here.
For the duration of the 24-hour launch period, people could surf in LA, learn about authentic Venezuelan cooking in Miami, take part in performance art in Paris, experience live street dance in Seoul, transform themselves in Tokyo, and save the ocean in Cape Town – all transported via Facebook Live.
The immersive experience was presented in helmet-mounted first person perspective. The videographer was YOU , the Airbnb guest.
We also introduced "Inferred Participation" as a new method of engagement. Instead of explicitly asking for audience contributions, we took what happened naturally bubbled up in comments and wove it into the narrative in a tangible or analog way. For example, during the Paris experience where performance artist Anne Marie had the in-person participants write down their feelings to be released in liberation over the wind of a metro grate, someone was actually writing down the feelings that people were commenting on in the Live stream. Bringing their participation into the actual experience.
Airbnb garnered over 6.2 million views of the 6 live streams around the world, with Miami, Paris and Tokyo being the top viewed. Miami alone saw had over 2M views.
We were able to squarely hit our target demographic for Trips with views from millennials contributing to over 22% of those that tuned in (ages 25-34).
We saw engagement and views coming from over 13 countries which not only helped launch this global product, but also to further the notion that Trips has a global appeal.
