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 improve the mobile Guest App experience for luxury travelers—guests who are planning higher-value trips, have elevated expectations for quality and service, and may compare Airbnb not only with other rental platforms but also with premium hotels, concierge services, and curated travel providers.

In this product design interview, focus on the end-to-end mobile workflow for a luxury guest: becoming inspired, searching and filtering for premium stays, evaluating trust and quality, booking with confidence, coordinating pre-trip needs, receiving support during the stay, and handling post-stay issues. The redesign should account for the fact that luxury travelers often care about certainty, personalization, privacy, convenience, service recovery, and the feeling that the experience has been carefully curated.

The problem is not just to make the app look more premium. It is to identify the most important frictions luxury guests face in the current marketplace experience and define what the mobile product must support so they can confidently choose Airbnb for high-stakes trips such as family vacations, milestone celebrations, business-leisure travel, or multi-destination itineraries.

The experience should consider:

- How luxury travelers discover and evaluate high-quality stays, including trust signals, photography, amenities, location, reviews, host responsiveness, and property consistency.

- How search, filtering, ranking, and browsing might need to differ for guests who value curation, exclusivity, reliability, and service over lowest price.

- How the mobile app should support pre-booking confidence for expensive stays, including cancellation terms, fees, policies, safety, accessibility, and dispute handling.

- How to reduce friction in trip planning, group coordination, special requests, check-in details, local recommendations, and communication with hosts or support.

- How Airbnb can balance a premium guest experience with host supply health, marketplace fairness, operational scalability, and brand trust.

- How the experience should compare with luxury hotels and travel concierge services without assuming Airbnb can fully replicate hotel operations.

- How to design for global travelers with different languages, cultures, payment preferences, service expectations, and privacy needs.

- How success could be reflected through guest satisfaction, conversion, repeat booking, support contacts, cancellations, issue resolution, and host outcomes.

Your goal is to frame the luxury traveler segment clearly, identify the highest-impact moments of friction in the mobile guest journey, and propose the scope of a redesigned experience that strengthens trust, convenience, and perceived quality while remaining realistic for Airbnb’s marketplace model.