Test out The Chronicle’s weekly Travel e-newsletter for greater memories like this! Sign up right here. In the spring of 2018, Quincey Cummings and Mitchell Andrus flew from the Bay Area to Panama to buy their new domestic: a 30-yr-vintage, forty-six-foot sailing yacht named the Esprit. First, they cruised through the Panama Canal and spent some days in Panama City prepping for the voyage in advance. Then, they swung around the Azuero Peninsula and grew to become the bow north. Forty-seven days after leaving Panama City — with a handful of stops for resupply and protection — Cummings, Andrus, and the Esprit docked in Berkeley.
The two-cabin yacht has to be the couple’s full-time house (which they share with a reluctantly seafaring cat named Panda) and the foundation of their enterprise. With Andrus as captain and Cummings as mate and chef, Q+M Travels takes visitors on sailing day trips, sunset cruises, and single-day excursions around San Francisco Bay and the California coast. Last week, Cummings and Andrus became two of the primary hosts on Airbnb Adventures, the quick-time period condo giant’s growth into multi-day, journey-focused tours.
Airbnb jumped into excursions in 2016 with Experiences, including activities like dumpling making in Shanghai and salsa instructions in Havana to its popular stock of rental houses, available rooms, and the occasional treehouse. “We launched in 12 cities worldwide with approximately 500 hosts,” says Airbnb’s Caroline Boone. She adds that you could e-book sports in nearly every United States globally three years later.
Boone is head of Adventures, which she says is designed to amplify Experiences from hours-long diversions to multi-day tours with all the logistics — minus your flight — covered. A few stretches longer than every week and cost hundreds of greenbacks, but most are a handful of days and some hundred dollars — adventure travel with a notably light dedication. Among the hand-picked itineraries for launch are a three-day canyoneering and cultural ride in Oman ($599), a -day trek and homestay in Northern Vietnam ($ eighty-two), and a 3-day mushroom foraging journey along the Oregon coast ($385). “We’ve always had this concept about cease-to-cease travel on Airbnb,” Boone says of offering a whole journey experience instead of simply one piece of the puzzle.
Adventure is a bid to make that a reality, but launching longer, more lively journeys poses new troubles and concerns — each for the journey-booking website and the hosts it is based on. To set up safety pointers and satisfactory control procedures, Airbnb turned to the Adventure Travel Trade Association. This membership agency represents adventure tour carriers, tourism boards, inns, and travel sellers. The ATTA advised the employer on the threat elements for unique sports and strategies for making sure guides are certified to deliver perfect cutting and preserve their visitor’s security.
If a tourist goes to song lions in Kenya or moves rafting in the Yukon, they want to sense confidence inside the guides, steering them via rapids or leading them through the bush. Should you experience carry south someplace in the backcountry, you couldn’t simply p.C. Your bag and make for the closest hotel. “This is in which you don’t want your local 18-12 months-antique to mention, ‘I can take you on a whitewater rafting ride,'” says ATTA CEO Shannon Stowell. “It’s one aspect to try this with an artwork museum and a cooking class, but it’s a distinctive ballgame when you enter nature and tradition. It needs to be accomplished sensitively and effectively.”
Boone says Airbnb has created a vetting process for Adventures that includes assessing the reveal of the host and the protection standards for each experience. Hosts can also want unique certifications for greater technical sports and hold their insurance on top of Airbnb’s $1 million coverage. After years of advertising and marketing, the ideas of residents renting homes and excursions hosted with the aid of cooks and musicians who don’t work complete-time in tourism, Adventures is nudging Airbnb closer to greater expert hosts. Stowell says a handful of ATTA contributors were part of the release, and some of the people indexed on the platform have their tour businesses working on the floor of their chosen locations.
If adventure travel presents new challenges for Airbnb, it additionally offers new opportunities. The ATTA estimates the adventure journey market at $683 billion, which has grown 260% in 2012. Boone sees the ability to enlarge that market by making tours more accessible — reducing the charge factor and broadening the definition of a “journey.” Stowell believes Airbnb will introduce a journey to a community of users and more youthful tourists. “From my perspective as a change affiliation, the most thrilling and interesting thing is that they’re establishing a massive new channel of vacationers that won’t have considered journey travel. I view it as a possibility to widen the market.”
