You are a product manager in AirBNB and need to improve the post-booking customer experience. What would you do?

In general, User Experience of AirBnB booking process is great but still some things can be done to improve the post booking user experience in particular.

.The plan to improve post-booking customer experience in AirBnB can be split in following parts :

Part A. Current Pain points in airbnb's post booking experiences :

1. No acknowledgement from the host until the guest reaches out to confirm if the booking has been successful

2. Cancellation by hosts if they get guests that offer more revenue from some different channel (offline / online)

3. No emails/notification from AirBnB about experiences / events during the booking. Because of this busy users cannot plan much in advance.

 

Part B. Solutions to above mentioned Pain Points:

1. Create a system to ensure that if the host does not acknowledge the booking within certain period of time, the booking is cancelled automatically and the host should be penalized. Guest should be offered recommendations for similar properties so that guest can rebook.

2. Create a periodic notification that will trigger periodically 30 days, 15 days, 5 days, 3 days, 1 day and educate the guest about various experiences/events that the guest can participate in during the stay.
 

Part C. Prioritization

System to ensure that booking is proactively acknowledged by the host in a timely manner without the need of guests to communicate multiple times has a higher impact on overall user experience. The effort to build such a system is also not very big. Re-Education of the hosts will be needed to make them aware of this new policy and functionality.

Part D. Success Metrics
Number of bookings cancelled due to host being non-responsive should go down.

 

In this way post-booking experience on AirBnB can be improved.