What’s the next thing travelers do after booking their stay in a new destination? Research and book experiences. Whether they’re more into food, culture, or sightseeing, they’re next step is to build an itinerary full of activities.
Knowing this, Airbnb found a way to keep travelers on their site a litrle longer: They created Airbnb Experiences, where travelers could now also book activities like guided tours, art workshops, wine tasting and more, directly on the same platform where they just booked their stay.
Airbnb’s experiences platform was tailored to authentic experiences led by locals, with the idea of connecting travelers to locals in the destinations they’re visiting. This also paved the way for local hosts to earn extra income by leading cool activities in their hometowns.
This year, Airbnb has expanded its Experiences offerings even more, making activities a central part of its ecosystem.
In this post, we’ll answer two very important questions for tour operators and attractions: What’s new for Airbnb Experiences in 2026? And how can it benefit your business?
- What are Airbnb Experiences?
- When did Airbnb launch experiences?
- How do I create an Airbnb experience?
- What makes a good Airbnb experience?
- Can you make money hosting Airbnb experiences?
- Pros of hosting Airbnb experiences
- Cons of hosting Airbnb experiences
What are Airbnb Experiences?
An Airbnb Experience is an in-person activity hosted by a local expert. Anyone can host an experience, as long as they have something unique to share with their guests.
Hosts are often tour guides, chefs, or destination experts who introduce travelers to a city’s local culture or cuisine, such as through a food tour or cooking class.
The program first launched with 500 experiences but has since grown to 40,000 activities across more than 1,000 cities worldwide, according to the platform.
The key to Airbnb Experiences is that they’re always led by locals. This allows guests to experience a destination from the perspective of someone who lives there. On the other hand, hosts can then earn money by sharing their hobbies and skills, while Airbnb takes a service fee — typically 20% of each booking — before payout
When did Airbnb launch experiences?
Airbnb launched experiences in 2016 in an effort to expand beyond the short-term rental business. It first started with 500 experiences in 12 cities, including Los Angeles, Miami, London, Cape Town, and Tokyo.
The activities were always led by a local and could last anywhere from a few hours to several days. One of the first experiences offered was a two-day art tour in Miami, where visitors could meet with local artists and create their own pieces.
These experiences could be booked by anyone, regardless of whether they were staying in an Airbnb or not. This allowed Airbnb to reach a wider audience, including travelers who weren’t comfortable with swapping a hotel for someone else’s home.
The launch of experiences brought both Airbnb and its hosts a new revenue stream.
What’s new for Airbnb Experiences in 2025?
Airbnb recently reimagined its Experiences offering, making it a core part of its platform next to Homes and the newly launched Airbnb Services. Now available in over 650 cities and growing, the newly revamped Experiences are still designed to help travelers explore a destination through the eyes of local experts — chefs, artists, athletes, and cultural insiders who bring their cities to life.
The emphasis continues to be on authenticity and activities that can’t be found in guidebooks, which brings us to the addition of Airbnb Originals. This is a newly curated collection of premium experiences hosted by high-profile personalities and cultural tastemakers. Think beyond guided tours — like learning to make pastries in Paris with a Michelin-recognized chef or playing beach volleyball in Rio with an Olympic athlete.
Social connection is also a growing focus. New social features now let users see who else is attending an experience before booking, message other guests during and after, and build a community of fellow travelers directly through the app. Combined with smarter search, flexible payment options like “Reserve Now, Pay Later,” and expanded AI-powered customer support, Airbnb’s new Experiences updates lean into personalization and a community-driven ethos.
How do I create an Airbnb experience?
For those interested in creating an Airbnb experience, the process is quite simple. First, you’ll want to gather the following information:
- A catchy title for your experience
- A detailed description of what you’ll do with guests
- The location(s) of your activity
- Details about what guests should bring
- 7 high-quality photos of people engaging in the activity
- The minimum age for guests
- The expected level of skill required to participate
- The maximum group size
- The start time and length of experiences
- The price per guest
Now, you can go ahead and create your listing at: https://www.airbnb.com/experience-hosting/become-a-host/intro.
Airbnb will now ask you what kind of Experience you’re offering. The new categories are:
- Nature and outdoors
- Art and design
- Fitness and wellness
- Food and drink
- History and culture
After choosing your category, you’ll be asked to define it further (i.e. “Wellness experience” or “workout”).
Choose the theme — like Entertainment or Drink — that best categorizes your activity offering.
Now, Airbnb will ask you about your expertise, for example, “How many years have you worked in fitness and wellness?” Then you’ll be prompted to share more about yourself, provide the address where guests will meet you, upload at least five photos that show your activity and demonstrate your skills, give your experience a title and description, and create a step-by-step itinerary.
- Expertise: Having exceptional skill, ability, or background
- Insider Access: Giving guests something they couldn’t do on their own
- Connection: Making meaningful interactions happen
After that, you’ll set the maximum number of guests, age requirements, define the price per guest, and submit your listing for review. Airbnb’s team may request additional information, like licenses, proof of insurance, or suggested edits, before approving your experience.
Once approved, your listing goes live and you can start accepting bookings.
Airbnb Experience Guidelines
Airbnb requires every experience to deliver expertise, insider access, and meaningful guest connections. Hosts must meet specific listing and conduct standards before and after publishing their activity.
Here’s a quick rundown of the latest guidelines:
- Hosts must complete Airbnb’s identity verification and may need to pass a background check.
- Guests must always know who is hosting — experiences must not be handed off to outside operators or unlisted co-hosts.
- Hosts cannot mix Airbnb guests with participants from other platforms in the same session.
- Experiences must include a clear, step-by-step itinerary with up to five activities per listing.
- Hosts must maintain any required licenses, insurance, or certifications and provide proof upon request.
- Activities cannot involve lodging, cross-country borders, or include unpermitted risk elements.
- Payments must be processed exclusively through Airbnb. Outside transactions are not allowed.
- Hosts are expected to honor all booked reservations and communicate with guests promptly.
- Listings must maintain a high quality rating and guest feedback to remain active.
- If a host uses an on-site assistant or co-host, they must provide advance notice to guests.
Insurance Requirements
When you host an experience, you’ll automatically be covered under Airbnb’s $1 million liability insurance, part of AirCover for Hosts. This protects you if you’re found legally responsible for a guest being injured, for their property being damaged, or for property being stolen during your experience. Co-hosts and assistants are also covered.
There’s no opt-in or fee, but Airbnb may require proof of insurance or licensing depending on the activity. The coverage does not include damage to your own property, intentional acts, extreme activities like bungee jumping, or online-related risks.
Payouts
Airbnb charges a 20% service fee for each experience booked through the platform. This fee is calculated based on the price set by the host, and guests see the full price at checkout with no additional service fees.
Hosts are paid after the experience is completed, typically within 24 hours. Airbnb automatically deducts the service fee from payouts, so hosts receive their earnings with the fee already taken out.
What makes a good Airbnb experience?
The three pillars of a good Airbnb experience are expertise, insider access, and connection.
Airbnb asks that hosts consider not only the expertise they have in a particular subject matter or activity but also the unique perspective they can bring to their guests.
For example, hosts Eleonora and Achref teach an immersive art and cooking class in Florence, Italy. To show guests their expertise, their bio describes Eleonora as a chef with over 16 years of international experience and Achref as one of the best Oud players.
The experience itself should also feature something that guests can’t easily do, learn, or find on their own. This is what Airbnb refers to as “insider access.” For example, the host of a beekeeping experience in Los Angeles welcomes guests to his own backyard and local community gardens to tour the beehives.
In other words, Airbnb wants hosts to think out-of-box and create experiences that guests can’t find anywhere else. Ideally, this would be something that your competitors aren’t offering.
The third and final pillar is about human connection, a prevalent theme for the home-sharing platform. Airbnb particularly wants to know, “How will you make sure your guests feel like they belong?”
From a logistics standpoint, most experiences are under three hours and open for groups of less than 10 people. There are also a series of guidelines that every experience should follow.
Pro tip: In practice, many Airbnb Experiences tend to run under three hours and cater to small groups (often fewer than 10), though Airbnb doesn’t enforce this as a hard rule.
Can you make money hosting Airbnb experiences?
In 2019, the average host earned $2,500 per experience listed in 2018. Meanwhile, some of the top hosts on the platform earned more than $300,000 in a year from their experiences, according to Airbnb.
A year later, with the introduction of online experiences, the platform reported that hosts earned more than $2 million in 2020. When in-person experiences were paused due to the pandemic, Airbnb gave hosts the ability to convert their experiences to virtual events.
Still, the success of an experience varies widely from host to host. Overall, DPGO found that hosts make anywhere from $0 to nearly $80,000 from both their in-person and online experiences.
Certain destinations and activities are also more popular than others. The top categories for experiences are food and drink, culture and history, and wellness. A food tour or yoga class is likely to perform well since both fall within those popular themes.
How to make good money as an Airbnb Experience Host
Here are some additional best practices for how you can create more memorable experiences and make more money.
- Go niche. Specialized workshops and one-of-a-kind cultural tours have shown significant increases in earnings. For example, culinary tours and art classes tend to attract considerable interest due to their broad appeal and potential for creating memorable guest experiences.
- Adapt to market trends. During peak travel seasons, hosts can offer seasonal experiences like holiday-themed tours or summer adventure activities. Conversely, virtual experiences have proven lucrative during off-peak seasons or when in-person interactions are limited.
- Optimize your location and pricing. Location plays a significant role in determining potential earnings. Hosts in major tourist destinations often see higher earnings. However, even hosts in less-traveled areas can attract significant interest by offering unique or high-quality experiences. Researching local competition and setting competitive prices is essential. Utilizing tools like Airbnb’s Similar Listings feature can help set the right price point to attract guests while ensuring profitability.
- Focus on high-demand experience categories. Certain types of experiences consistently perform well. Categories like outdoor adventures, food and drink, and arts and crafts are particularly popular. For instance, a well-crafted outdoor hiking tour or a hands-on cooking class can attract a wide range of guests.
- Maintain high ratings. Consistency and quality are key to maximizing earnings. High ratings and positive reviews significantly boost visibility on the platform. Offering personalized touches, maintaining excellent communication with guests, and ensuring a high standard of cleanliness and amenities can lead to repeat bookings and referrals.
- Invest in top-quality photos. Hosts should invest in high-quality photos and compelling descriptions to showcase their experiences. Highlighting unique aspects and nearby attractions can make the listing stand out. Regularly updating the listing and keeping it current with new photos and accurate information can also attract more guests.
Pros of hosting Airbnb experiences
Whether you’re thinking about creating an in-person or online activity, there could be many benefits to tapping into Airbnb experiences:
- Reach a new audience: Airbnb is one of the largest online travel agencies in the world. It reaches millions of travelers from in and outside the U.S., meaning your tours will become visible to a very large audience.
- Test out a new tour: Tour operators could introduce a new tour via Airbnb experiences before adding it to their official schedule. This way, they’ll gather feedback from guests and be able to tweak the tour before selling it on their website.
- Flexible scheduling: You can choose to offer Airbnb tours on the days when your tour company or attraction isn’t operating. If you’re creating an online experience, you can even schedule the activity at the end of the day when you’ve completed your in-person tours.
- Supplement your income:Your Airbnb experience will reach a wide audience of travelers and has the potential to bring you more bookings. The extra earnings can supplement the income you make from your current tours or attraction.
Cons of hosting Airbnb experiences
Here are a few cons to consider before making your final decision:
- You have to come up with a unique idea: Airbnb wants its experiences to be something that travelers won’t experience anywhere else. This means you’ll have to think outside the box and find something that your competitors aren’t offering.
- There are a lot of guidelines: Your experience will only be approved if it follows all of Airbnb’s guidelines, and there are quite a few of them. One of the most prominent is that your tour must provide guests with some sort of insider access, meaning it should teach or show them something they can’t do on their own.
- Steep commission fees: Airbnb takes a 20% commission fee from every completed booking. You’ll need to keep that fee in mind when you price your experiences.
- You’ll need to manually keep track of bookings: Airbnb doesn’t integrate with your booking software, so you’ll need to keep track of new bookings on your own.
- No guest minimums: There are no guest minimums, meaning that if only one person books an experience meant for 8 people, you must honor the booking.
- Platform risk: Airbnb can be a great platform for new tours, activities, and experiences. Yet if something were to happen to the Airbnb platform, you could lose your entire business. Airbnb help pave the way to reaching your first 6-figures, but you should seek a more balanced distribution strategy in the future. Ideally, you’ll begin driving bookings from your own website as well as other OTA marketplaces.
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Now that you have a better grasp of how Airbnb experiences work, you can decide if the platform is right for you.
Hosting a tour on Airbnb will put your brand in front of a wider audience. As you weigh the pros and cons, consider looking up experiences in your area to see what’s already out there.You might just find a gap that your company can step into.
