Airbnb Is Trying to Breathe New Life Into the Party House

Airbnb has finally built a house. It’s a small property, but one that seemed challenging to create: the two-story pastel Victorian from the 2009 movie Up. "One of the most iconic homes in any film, ever," said Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s CEO, as images of the home flashed behind him at an event in Los Angeles, where he kept reassuring the audience that it was real. Yes, Airbnb’s design team really did recreate every domestic possession of fictional retired balloon salesman Carl Fredricksen, down to the two plane tickets to Venezuela on the mantle. Yes, these are actual photos of the home on an Abiquiu, New Mexico, mesa that somehow look even better than Pixar’s own stills from the film. And yes, that is a crane lifting the house, 8,000 balloon-like orbs and all, into the air, suspending it 50 feet above a white picket fence. The audience gasped. The house does, in fact, go up.

It was a lot to absorb, and that’s exactly what Airbnb was going for at its summer release event at a soundstage in Historic Filipinotown this week. The Up house is the first of the home-sharing platform’s new "Icons," 11 immersive, one-night experiences the company unveiled, which Chesky heralded as a return to Airbnb’s roots. "They allow people to step into someone else’s world, and, at its best, this is what Airbnb does," he said. "It’s what we have always been about."

But what Airbnb is actually about continues to be a heated topic of debate as more and more cities place restrictions on just about everything one might want to do in "someone else’s world." Just six months ago, Chesky was promising big changes to an app plagued with complaints about high prices, bait-and-switch listings, and excessive fees. New York City had just begun enforcing what Airbnb called a "de facto ban" on its services, and other cities found clever workarounds to limit Airbnb’s influence. As inflation sent rent soaring, Airbnb has been blamed for siphoning away rental units, keeping desperately needed housing stock off the market. And after the devastating fires in Maui, Hawaii’s legislature voted to give counties the power to phase out short-term rentals, which is expected to be signed into law Friday. None of those challenges were addressed in this year’s presentation, except maybe when Chesky made a joke about the cost of an Icons experience: "There are no cleaning fees." Everyone laughed.

In an effort to deflect the criticism Airbnb is under for contributing to the housing crisis, the company looks to be shifting its focus away from smaller, everyday homes and doubling down on the party house. Chesky talked about how the vast majority of Airbnb stays—81 percent—are made by groups of people who have to find and agree upon the perfect place. But the app is notoriously bad for group bookings. So, Chesky said, Airbnb built a new process that helps multiple users crowdsource a property instead of, say, shifting the decision-making to a dreaded external spreadsheet. The thinking goes that, for 10 people traveling together, getting everyone to agree on whether "Midcentury Palm Springs Home for 10 with Sparkling Pool" is better than "Pristine Palm Springs Midcentury Wonderland Sleeps 10" can be a challenge. The new wishlist and group chat features would hypothetically make this process a little bit smoother. But, it still won’t do anything to shift municipal policies in places like that desert destination, where a large group will still have to adhere to famously strict noise restrictions.

With the Icons, Airbnb guests can be transported away from at least a few of the rules of the real world, and enter ones built on fantasy. They’re an extension of past listings that have appealed to a very specific brand of Gen X and millennial nostalgia: a Barbie Dreamhouse in Malibu; the Home Alone house, listed around Christmas last year; a ’90s basement in the last remaining Blockbuster store. A new Icons category on the app allows users to register for such experiences, with the winners chosen by lottery. (Airbnb says it will pick 4,000 winners this year.) The winning guests are given only a few days’ notice to get to the property, then are closely monitored by Airbnb staff, making a stay in, say, Prince’s Purple Rain house in Minneapolis, decidedly less fun than advertised. But someone will be very excited to wake up surrounded by roadsters at the Ferrari Museum in Maranello, Italy, with former Formula 1 driver Marc Gené escorting them to a race. Marvel universe fans will definitely flock to the X-Mansion, an actual Westchester, New York, estate where artist Josh Vidas has painstakingly painted each surface to imbue the X-Men ’97 training academy with 2D comic-realism.

Perhaps the most unique experience will be the night spent in the clocktower of the Musée d’Orsay, giving guests an unobstructed view of the opening ceremonies of the Paris Summer Olympics, to be staged right across the street on the banks of the Seine. This experience is hosted by industrial designer Mathieu Lehanneur, who made this year’s Olympic torch, one of which will be installed, fresh from its relay, like a sleek lighting fixture mere feet from where guests sleep.

There’s a widening gap between where Airbnb’s users can feasibly go to evade reality, and the reality of what Airbnb can actually offer them.

That Airbnb chose L.A. as the location of this year’s announcement seemed like a hand-off of sorts, as the city prepares to host the 2028 Summer Olympics. Airbnb has been a worldwide partner of the International Olympic Committee since it inked a reported $500 million deal in 2019. Part of the deal included adding "hundreds of thousands of new hosts" in the cities of all upcoming Olympics through 2028. Airbnb expects to lodge at least 500,000 people during this summer’s games, according to Jay Carney, Airbnb’s global policy director. "The Olympics are such a massive event that hotel capacity is almost never up to the task and you really see prices soar," he says. "We're very eager to help there and show that hosting can create economic benefits for hosts who are locals and also create affordable alternatives for people." In Paris, an astounding 3,000 apartments each month are applying for a short-term rental registration number ahead of July’s opening ceremonies.

That figure is alarming to housing advocates in L.A., where a 2022 study found that nearly half of the properties listed on short-term rental sites violated city laws. Five years after L.A.’s home-sharing ordinance was passed, the city still has no real enforcement strategy, and a recent L.A. city council report noted it can take two to three years to investigate any type of violation. Meanwhile, the city has a string of the ultimate group-booking events looming on the horizon—not just the Olympics in 2028, but the World Cup in 2026, and the Super Bowl in 2027. "Online short-term rental platforms continue to encourage the conversion of homes into short-term party houses that undermine communities, bringing late-night noise, exacerbating parking shortages, and leaving streets strewn with trash," says Rebecca Ayala, policy and advocacy director for Better Neighbors LA. 

Carney, who notes that Airbnb works very closely with cities, says the company has had a "global ban" on parties since 2020 and just .03 percent of all bookings result in party allegations. He also pointed out the fine print in Airbnb’s data: groups are considered to be two or more guests, which is what makes that 81 percent figure so high. Some of the Icons experiences aren’t technically stays, either—a Kevin Hart-hosted experience, for example, is not an overnight, but a private comedy show; the week-long trip with reggaeton star Feid is on a tour bus—and many of the sleepovers, despite the square-footage of the accommodations, are for two to four people. These homes might be positioned as ultimate party pads, but they’ll likely serve as solitary sets for Instagram and TikTok influencers.

So what does Airbnb seek to gain by marketing itself as the go-to for groups, gatherings, and sensory-overload experiences? If effective, it will get more users registering for the app, and create a steady stream of enthusiastic social media impressions that can be strategically deployed to quash a negative news cycle. Airbnb also seems to have successfully tapped into the exact right breed of societal escapism in a field saturated with hyper-detailed, pop-culture touchpoints, from Meow Wolf to a Wes Anderson exhibit. But that also illustrates a bigger challenge for the platform: as the company pours resources into these more outlandish stays, which are limited in scope, the standard short-term rental is coming under increasing scrutiny. There’s a widening gap between where Airbnb’s users can feasibly go to evade reality, and the reality of what Airbnb can actually offer them.

At the end of the L.A. event, promising one last bit of "magic in the real world," Chesky walked dramatically to the edge of the stage. A curtain was tugged open and the audience once again gasped. The Up house had been there the whole time. Machines spewed fog that swirled around its Pantone-matched shingles. Now this is the ideal Airbnb property. Meticulously crafted, able to be transplanted to a new jurisdiction if necessary, and completely disconnected from all the restrictive policies of the real world.

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