Redesign the mobile experience of Guest App for luxury travelers

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 rethink the mobile Guest App experience for luxury travelers—guests who are planning higher-consideration trips, often with larger budgets, elevated service expectations, and lower tolerance for uncertainty. These users may be booking milestone vacations, family retreats, remote-work escapes, or premium stays where trust, quality, convenience, and confidence matter as much as price.

Today, the standard guest workflow may not fully address the friction luxury travelers face: discovering truly premium homes, validating quality, understanding service levels, coordinating complex trip needs, communicating with hosts, handling changes, and feeling supported before, during, and after the stay. The redesign should focus on the end-to-end mobile experience, not just visual polish.

The scope is the Airbnb Guest App experience for luxury-oriented guests in a global marketplace with hosts, homes, and experiences. Consider how Airbnb can preserve marketplace trust and host supply health while giving guests a more premium, reliable, and inspiring journey.

The experience should consider:

- How luxury travelers define “premium” across homes, locations, amenities, service, privacy, design, and reliability

- Key mobile journey moments: inspiration, search, comparison, booking, pre-trip planning, arrival, in-stay support, and post-trip follow-up

- Friction in evaluating trust and quality, including photos, reviews, host reputation, policies, fees, and expectations

- Needs of different luxury traveler subsegments, such as families, couples, groups, business travelers, and international guests

- How to support higher-touch trip planning without undermining Airbnb’s marketplace model or host operations

- Safety, dispute resolution, cancellation, and support expectations for expensive or high-stakes bookings

- Differentiation from hotels, online travel agencies, premium rental platforms, and local rental services

- Constraints around supply quality, consistency, host participation, scalability, and mobile usability

The goal is to define a thoughtful product design direction for a premium guest experience that improves confidence, reduces planning friction, and makes Airbnb a stronger choice for luxury travel—without prescribing a final feature set before the user needs, trade-offs, and journey priorities are clearly explored.