Airbnb's relaunched experiences business is growing 6x year over year in Paris, and CEO Brian Chesky credits the gains to a customer segment most competitors have written off: locals booking activities in their own city.

"Locals in Paris are booking experiences in Paris, something we never thought would happen, so now we're taking that playbook to New York and other cities," Chesky said last week at the Skift Global Forum. "And I think we're not even close to that happening in 1,000 cities but I think that will happen soon."

The Paris result marks a course correction for a product Airbnb first launched more than a decade ago and has restarted several times. For the 2025 relaunch, the company abandoned its earlier approach of launching everywhere at once and concentrated on getting a single city right. Chesky said Airbnb should have started that way from the beginning.

The company has also relaxed its long-held resistance to high-demand mainstream tours of landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, widening the supply it is willing to distribute.

Supply is scaling quickly. Airbnb added thousands of experiences in the second quarter, lifting experiences supply nearly 80% year over year.

Why the locals bet is contrarian

The economics of experiences distribution have historically favored tourists. Viator and GetYourGuide spend little on marketing to residents because tourists book under time pressure, pay more, and cost less to reach. Locals, by contrast, can always postpone a purchase and shop on price — a weaker conversion profile for platforms paying to acquire them.

Accor tested the same thesis and retreated. The hotel group offered Parisians services such as yoga classes and dry cleaning through its Accor Local program, then shut it down. CEO Sébastien Bazin said hotel general managers "couldn't give a damn" about the initiative.

Airbnb's advantage, according to Arival co-founder Alex Kremer, is structural rather than behavioral. The company's brand is expanding beyond homes, and its customer acquisition costs run far lower than those of experiences-only rivals. That margin of safety gives Airbnb room to experiment where a standalone experiences platform would burn cash.

What comes next

Chesky framed the current state as early: the local-booking dynamic is proven in one city, partially working in a second wave, and far from the 1,000-city scale he expects. The test of the Paris playbook in New York — a market with high supply costs and dense competing entertainment options — will indicate whether the 6x growth figure reflects a repeatable operating model or a single-market anomaly.