Root cause a sudden decline in retention among hosts using Experiences at global scale

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 hosts continuing to create, manage, and run bookable activities for guests across many countries, categories, and demand patterns. In this interview, you are asked to investigate a sudden global-scale decline in retention among Experiences hosts: hosts who were previously active are not continuing to list, accept bookings, or operate experiences at expected rates.

Your task is to frame the retention anomaly clearly, determine whether it is real or measurement-driven, and build a structured root-cause investigation across host segments, geographies, experience types, marketplace dynamics, product changes, policy changes, trust and safety factors, and external travel-market conditions. The focus is not to jump to a fix, but to identify what evidence you would seek, how you would narrow the problem, and how you would prioritize the most plausible causes.

The experience should consider:

- How to define “host retention” for Experiences, including the denominator, time window, and what counts as retained activity.

- Whether the decline is global or concentrated by region, city, host tenure, category, language, seasonality, supply quality, or booking volume.

- Instrumentation and data-quality checks, such as event tracking changes, dashboard logic, host status definitions, or delayed reporting.

- Marketplace health signals, including guest demand, booking conversion, cancellations, pricing, payouts, reviews, and host earnings.

- Product or operational changes that may have affected hosts, such as onboarding, listing management, calendar tools, policy enforcement, support workflows, or ranking/distribution.

- External and competitive factors, including travel demand shifts, regulatory constraints, local events, macroeconomic pressure, or alternative platforms.

- Evidence needed to distinguish correlation from causation, including cohorts, pre/post comparisons, control groups, and qualitative host feedback.

- Immediate mitigation, communication, monitoring, and prevention steps once the likely root cause is identified.

The goal is to demonstrate a rigorous RCA approach suitable for a complex global marketplace: define the anomaly, validate the data, segment intelligently, generate and test hypotheses, identify the most likely drivers, and outline how Airbnb should respond while protecting host trust, marketplace quality, and guest experience.