Root cause a sudden decline in retention among hosts using 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 depends on a healthy supply of hosts who continue creating, listing, and delivering bookable activities for travelers. In this scenario, the team has observed a sudden decline in retention among hosts using Experiences, and you are asked to investigate what may be causing it.

Assume you are the PM responsible for diagnosing the issue across the host lifecycle: onboarding, listing creation, availability management, bookings, guest communication, payout, reviews, and repeat hosting. The decline may be driven by product changes, demand shifts, marketplace dynamics, policy updates, operational issues, seasonality, trust and safety concerns, or measurement problems.

Your task is not to immediately propose a new feature, but to structure a root-cause analysis that identifies whether the retention drop is real, where it is concentrated, what hypotheses are most plausible, what evidence you would seek, and what actions you would take to mitigate the issue while preventing recurrence.

The experience should consider:

- How to define “host retention” for Experiences, including the denominator, time window, and whether retention means active listings, available dates, completed bookings, repeat hosting, or revenue-generating activity.

- How to confirm the anomaly is real by checking instrumentation, tracking changes, data freshness, event definitions, cohort construction, and historical baselines.

- Which segments to investigate, such as new vs. tenured hosts, geography, experience category, price tier, language, urban vs. destination markets, supply quality, host rating, booking volume, and cancellation history.

- How marketplace factors may affect host retention, including guest demand, search ranking, conversion, seasonality, competition from other travel activities, and changes in traveler behavior.

- Which product or policy changes could have contributed, such as updates to host tools, fees, payout timing, review systems, safety requirements, quality standards, or listing visibility.

- What qualitative and operational signals to gather from host support contacts, host interviews, complaint themes, dispute cases, cancellations, and community forums.

- How to prioritize hypotheses based on impact size, timing correlation, affected cohorts, reversibility, and confidence in available evidence.

- What short-term mitigations, monitoring, communication, and longer-term prevention mechanisms should be considered once the likely cause is identified.

The goal is to demonstrate a structured RCA approach that protects host supply health, marketplace quality, traveler trust, and the long-term viability of Airbnb Experiences without jumping prematurely to conclusions.