Define success metrics for AirCover serving first-time guests at global scale

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Airbnb is a travel marketplace connecting guests and hosts; its products include stays, experiences, host tools, guest booking, trust and safety, payments, and reviews.

Airbnb wants to evaluate whether AirCover is successfully supporting first-time guests across its global marketplace. AirCover is intended to increase guest confidence by providing protections and support when issues arise before, during, or after a stay, especially for users who may not yet understand how Airbnb differs from hotels or other travel platforms.

For this metrics interview, focus on defining a measurement framework that helps Airbnb understand whether AirCover improves the first-time guest experience, builds trust, and supports healthy marketplace outcomes without creating unintended operational, financial, or host-side consequences. The scope should account for global variation in guest expectations, stay types, local regulations, support operations, and issue severity.

Your task is not to design new AirCover features, but to define how Airbnb should measure success for this product experience. Consider how metrics would be used by product, operations, trust and safety, finance, and marketplace teams to make decisions about product investment, policy changes, support workflows, and international scaling.

The experience should consider:

- How to define the eligible first-time guest population, including booking stage, completed stays, cancellations, and repeat usage after the first trip.

- What the primary success metric should represent, including its numerator, denominator, time window, and decision relevance.

- How to distinguish between awareness of AirCover, usage of AirCover, resolution quality, and long-term trust in Airbnb.

- What instrumentation is needed across booking, trip, issue reporting, customer support, refund/rebooking flows, and post-stay feedback.

- How to segment metrics by geography, accommodation type, trip length, issue category, guest origin, host tenure, and support channel.

- What guardrail metrics should monitor cost, abuse, host experience, support burden, booking conversion, cancellations, and marketplace quality.

- How to compare cohorts of first-time guests while accounting for seasonality, travel intent, destination risk, and differences across markets.

- How the metrics should help Airbnb decide whether AirCover is improving confidence and retention versus simply increasing claims or support interactions.

The goal is to produce a clear, decision-useful success metrics framework for AirCover’s impact on first-time guests at global scale, including how Airbnb would know the product is working, where it is falling short, and what trade-offs must be monitored as the program grows.