Design a phased migration plan for Wishlists without hurting users

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 is planning to migrate its Wishlists experience, a feature guests use to save, organize, compare, and share potential stays or trips. The migration may involve changes to the underlying data model, user interface, sharing behavior, notifications, or integrations with search, booking, and host-facing systems. The challenge is to move users to the new experience without losing saved homes, breaking shared lists, reducing booking intent, or creating confusion during trip planning.

This is an execution-focused question. You should define how you would phase the migration, coordinate across product, engineering, design, data, support, legal/privacy, and operations, and protect both guest and host marketplace health. Consider that Wishlists may include high-intent travelers, collaborative trip planners, repeat guests, and users comparing Superhost listings; disruption could affect conversion, trust, and host demand.

The experience should consider:

- Which user cohorts, wishlist types, platforms, and geographies should be included in each migration phase

- How saved listings, notes, collaborators, privacy settings, links, and notifications are preserved or validated

- Dependencies across search, listing pages, booking flows, mobile apps, web, emails, push notifications, and customer support tooling

- Go/no-go criteria for each phase, including data integrity, user engagement, conversion, error rates, and support contacts

- Rollback or remediation plans if users lose access, sharing breaks, or booking behavior declines

- Communication plans for affected users, internal teams, hosts, and support agents

- Launch risks such as stale inventory, removed listings, localization issues, app-version fragmentation, privacy expectations, and marketplace trust

Your goal is to outline a practical phased migration plan that minimizes user harm while allowing Airbnb to safely modernize Wishlists. Focus on sequencing, ownership, operational readiness, risk controls, and decision points rather than proposing a new Wishlist product design.