Prioritize a quarterly roadmap for Experiences

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 Experiences lets travelers discover and book activities hosted by locals, such as tours, classes, food experiences, outdoor activities, and cultural events. For this execution interview, you are the product lead responsible for prioritizing the next quarter’s roadmap for Experiences, with a specific focus on budget travelers who may be price-sensitive, itinerary-driven, and comparing Airbnb against alternatives such as hotels, online travel agencies, Google Travel, and local activity providers.

The roadmap must balance traveler demand, host supply health, marketplace quality, trust, safety, and operational feasibility. Budget travelers may want affordable, authentic, easy-to-book activities, but the product also needs to protect host economics, avoid low-quality supply, manage cancellations or disputes, and fit within Airbnb’s broader travel marketplace.

You should frame how you would decide what to build this quarter, how you would sequence work across product, design, engineering, data, operations, policy, trust and safety, and host teams, and how you would manage launch risk. The emphasis is on execution: turning a broad product area into a clear quarterly operating plan with owners, dependencies, trade-offs, and measurable checkpoints.

The experience should consider:

- The core budget-traveler workflow, from trip inspiration and search to comparing prices, booking an Experience, attending it, and leaving feedback.

- Key friction points such as affordability, discoverability, trust in hosts, schedule availability, cancellation risk, hidden costs, and confidence in quality.

- How to prioritize between demand-side improvements, host-side tools, marketplace quality, pricing, safety, and operational support.

- Dependencies across teams, including search/recommendations, payments, trust and safety, customer support, host onboarding, localization, and data instrumentation.

- Sequencing for a one-quarter roadmap, including what must ship first, what can be tested, and what should be deferred.

- Launch criteria, go/no-go checkpoints, rollback plans, and communication to travelers, hosts, and internal stakeholders.

- Success metrics and guardrails such as bookings, conversion, repeat usage, host earnings, cancellation rates, refunds, complaints, quality scores, and marketplace liquidity.

Your goal is to present a practical quarterly roadmap prioritization approach for Airbnb Experiences that improves the budget-traveler experience while maintaining trust, host supply quality, and operational reliability.