Airbnb wants to make it easier for you to plan trips with friends.
New features for the service, several of which will make arranging trips a more collaborative experience, were revealed at a recent tech talk given at Airbnb’s San Francisco headquarters.
First up, the room- and apartment-rental service plans to let you add friends and family to trips so you can discuss ideas on places to stay and things to do, TechCrunch reported.
Airbnb hasn’t said when the new feature will be made available, but when it does go live you’ll be able to send invites to others who’re coming along on your travels. Once they join your online group, you’ll all be able to add thoughts and ideas about the upcoming trip to a master list, whether it’s about a specific accommodation one of you has searched out, an experience you might want to try while away, or a cool restaurant or bar someone in your travel group has discovered.
You’ll be able to see who made the suggestion, and everyone else will have the chance to comment on the idea. Airbnb hopes that collaborating will lead to the best possible plans for a trip. At the current time, if you’re planning some time away, you’re probably firing off messages to your fellow travelers via a messaging app or email, but Airbnb’s upcoming feature will keep everyone inside the appnb and hopefully make the experience of planning a trip a whole lot more seamless.
Of course, if you don’t have time to put forward your ideas and actually rather liked the idea of your best buddy planning the entire trip, that’s cool, too. In that case, the new feature will be a way of keeping you in the loop about how the plans are developing.
Day-by-day planner
Other updates in the pipeline include a revamped planner to help you organize your trip. According to TechCrunch, the updated feature will lay everything out on an easy-to-view, day-by-day basis so you can see how your travel plans are coming together. The planner will show confirmed bookings for accommodation and experiences as well as a map so you can see precisely where everything’s happening. You’ll also find a suggestions section where more ideas can be added as the start of your trip draws closer.
Over recent years, Airbnb has been adding a bunch of new features — including new tiers of service, Snapchat-like Travel Stories, a split-payments tool, and the expansion of its “experiences” element — in a bid to become your go-to travel companion. These latest announcements aim to help the service continue toward that goal by creating a one-stop shop for all your trip-planning needs.
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