I do believe that AirBNB’s “Neighborhoods” signals a significant change in the UX of the site and the service as a whole.

On the surface, you could say that AirBNB is competing with hotels, motels, and hostels in the “places to stay when I am traveling” business. This may be true, and it is certainly how AirBNB started out from a UI/UX perspective.

Hotels and the like are designed to serve the needs of a particular type of person: someone who is traveling for a specific reason, in most cases for a short period of time. Perhaps they are in town for an event of some sort, or maybe they have come to the new place on a business trip. In these instances, the person did not actively choose the place they were going, just ended up there due to proximity or because outside forces sent them there. For the most part, these people don’t know much about the city they’re staying in, and don’t care to. They probably want a clean, warm hotel room that is as close to the thing they have to do as possible, with easy access to the airport. If they’re feeling adventurous, they’ll ask the concierge to point them to a good local spot for dinner. Hotels, and therefore hotel booking websites, serve this population well. If you pay attention to the design and layout of these sites, you’ll see it reflected in their hierarchy and in what bits of information they choose to highlight.

I would guess, with no real evidence, that AirBNB has discovered that many people who are using their service are not this kind of traveler. I believe their new interface is designed to more closely align the tone of their service with the tone of their customers.

The “Neighborhoods” feature measures the places one might stay more qualitatively and less quantitatively. AirBNB chooses to highlight large photographs and descriptive tags about each neighborhood, as opposed to miles from the airport. This sort of approach is much better suited to casual travelers, vacationers, and a new breed of hipster nomad. These people ARE actively choosing the places that they want to go, so their decision is not as simple as the aforementioned business travelers. Additionally, they may be traveling for long spans of time. Very few people would be able to stay in a hotel for a month without losing their minds, but that is not the case with an AirBNB listing. If you’re scouting out a place to live for the summer, you certainly want more information than a simple hotel booking site provides. The pictures of community members, quotes from locals, and rich storytelling on each neighborhood page is a plea to travel in a meaningful way, not simply stay in hotels and hit the tourist traps.

Overall, I’m glad to see AirBNB taking this approach, and I think it will serve them well.

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