#public api

A Journey Towards Openness

At the 2015 Airbnb Open the company unveiled Host Assist, a platform aimed at including externally-built tools and services to help hosts do their job more efficiently.

At the same time, we spotted a couple of websites and appsmaking use of official Airbnb API, sparking the interest of hundreds of developers across the world, all interested in improving the experience for hosts and guests.

Unfortunately, both these early signs of aperture were not followed up by concrete initiatives, as Airbnb kept its platform inside of a walled garden.

Developers had to find hacks and workarounds to obtain information from the private Airbnb API, something that was against Airbnb’s terms of service.

However, as the company kept growing, also the interest to collaborate with it increased. In the last 2 years, despite the limitations imposed by Airbnb, many services have been launched by independent developers, showing a clear demand for a more structured approach that could help the entire ecosystem grow.

Partnerships as the Way Forward

Allowing travellers to live local experiences in the most authentic way has always been at the center of Brian Chesky’s vision for Airbnb.

In the last years Airbnb has started to look outside of its core accommodation rental business, with the intention to be the central hub to manage every aspect of a trip.

In order to execute this strategy, Airbnb acquired a few startups (like the Barcelona-based Trip4real), and signed partnerships with others (as Resy and Detour).

These collaborations are a clear sign of how Airbnb can - and in some cases needs to - leverage external partners to push its growth outside of the pure hospitality business. However, the company has until now limited the access of its API by examining prospective tie-ins partnership by partnership.

As Airbnb announced an updated Affiliate program at the end of September, we speculated the upcoming launch of an Official API to support Airbnb’s new interest in partnerships development.

Still, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that Airbnb has finally made the step forwards to create a platform for developers to build applications interfacing with its ecosystem.

The Long Awaited Official Airbnb API

Announced in parallel to more advanced host tools and integrations with Property Management Systems, Airbnb is now finally ready to give access to its API to external developers.

While the API is not publicly accessible to everyone, this is a huge step forwards for the entire ecosystem, as the availability of an official API will make the development process clearer, simpler and more structured, allowing to implement ideas that until now could not have been executed.

You can request access to them by filing an application here.

Airbnb will evaluate incoming requests (looking at business opportunity, technological strength and ability to support the shared customers. If you get accepted you will be granted access to the API documentation, with the support of a “global team of partnership managers” to help you succeed in the development of your application.

The specific details of the technical API documentation are not publicly available, but from the FAQ published on the page, the focus seem to be more skewed towards the host side:

The API allows development teams to securely Oauth into new and existing Airbnb accounts. Your application users will have the ability to push updates to content, rates, and availability. As Airbnb guests book your listings, we’ll pass back messaging and reservation details, allowing applications to build custom workflows and create amazing experiences for our shared guests.

Given that Airbnb is currently hiring for API Integration Consultant roles, both in Dublin and Berlin, we expect the efforts and resources put into the development of this platform to only grow over time.

We will update this article as soon as we will gather more information... but in the meanwhile, if you have more details about the new Airbnb API, let us know in the comments below!

A new and better way to share your Airbnb data

To promote and organize the 2015 Airbnb Open, the company launched a dedicated website on a separated domain.

The participation to the event – that in November will gather in Paris around 6000 hosts from all over the world – is limited to members of the Airbnb host community with at least a booking in the last year that sign up on the Airbnb Open website.

Interestingly, we noticed that during the registration process, airbnbopen.com directly accesses your airbnb.com account information, even if the two websites are pretty much independent entities.

In order to facilitate the registration process, the Airbnb Open website will ask for permission to access your basic Airbnb profile details, information about past and upcoming bookings and the details of your listings, automatically retrieving all the information needed.

This new “Airbnb Connect” functionality is very similar to what most Internet users are already accustomed to: an easy way to access third party sites using existing login credentials, granting access only the necessary information without the need to share login details or other confidential data.

In parallel to its internal version, in its early days Airbnb built a closed and very basic Application Programming Interface (API) for third parties, giving access only to a small selection of partners (Hipmunk is one of the few).

As the affiliate program that was connected to it eventually got discontinued, also the third party API development languished. The company had been receiving many requests from users interested in developing new ideas using a publicly available API, but has been so far very protective of its data and vague about a future development of a public API.

By tightly controlling the access to the digital assets of its platform, Airbnb can maintain more control over its brand, the quantity and quality of the services offered and the overall user experience.

However, even without an officially documented API, multiple companies – as BeyondPricing (a dynamic price suggestion tool), Traity (a reputation management system) or AirDNA (a data analysis and comparison provider) – started building services on top of Airbnb features, informally “integrating” with the activities of Airbnb users.

Given the closeness of Airbnb’s ecosystem, external services had been forced to rely on workarounds that, not only in most of the cases break Airbnb’s Terms and Conditions, but also raise serious security concerns around the way they have to deal with login details.

As Facebook, Google, Twitter, Linkedin and many other platforms that rely on OAuth authentication methods to share part of the information available on their servers, also Airbnb seems to be moving into a direction that will more easily allow external developers to access a set of predefined information.

A few reasons to give developers access to a public API

Airbnb's stated mission is to get people together as part as a bigger and more global community, where sharing – and not ownership – is what increases the sense of belonging that increases trust among human beings.

It’s a bit ironic to see that the 7-years old company still has not opened up (at least a part of) its core assets to be reused, shared, and monetized through a public API.

By finding the right balance between openness and a consistent brand experience, Airbnb would end up creating extra value for the company, external partners and for hosts and guests in a variety of ways:

Reaching new customers and opening new markets: making the API available to the public would allow third parties to extend the scope of Airbnb’s services. Audiences or niches that might otherwise have been hard to reach or convert could then be more easily addresses.

Fostering innovation: Airbnb’s community demonstrates on a daily basis that many entrepreneurial individuals out there filled with passion and ready to face and solve new challenges. Making their life easier would only increase the quantity and quality of the output produced.

Increasing user adoption: new applications would address problems that might have been left unsolved or that could be a distraction for the company. Building an underlying layer that powers external services would allow Airbnb to still boost the awareness and adoption of its main products, whilst maintaining focus on the main company goals.

Enabling the ecosystem evolution: with the development of external services and applications, successful new ideas could be absorbed by the company, pushing forwards the boundaries of the creative development process, maintaining it alive and competitive.

An entire ecosystem of API-powered companies

There are plenty of possible applications that might benefit from the release of a public API, allowing the improvement of existing corollary products or the creation of brand new ones:

Cleaning, laundry and key handling services could easily identify and import upcoming reservations, simplifying the management process for many hosts.

Pricing recommendation tools could analyze individual listings’ performance and provide more accurate and personalized recommendations to maximise the number of bookings received.

Listing optimization providers could have access to the management of an Airbnb listing, helping to improve it.

Calendar management services could offer a better management experience to power users using multiple platforms.

Travel websites could build discovery experiences that embeds the best accommodation in an organic and seamless way, sending highly qualified traffic to Airbnb.

Travel planners could offer more complete packages featuring Airbnb accommodation instead of hotels.

Event organizers could have the ability to recommend the best places available to their attendees.

Local guides could have access to travel preferences and past experiences to understand what guests could like the most.

Many public tech company built their success by opening up to the community of developers, allowing them to create thousands of applications and giving birth to an ecosystem of startups that shared access to products, services and information.

Given its extremely successful track, Airbnb is soon expected to prepare for an IPO. Having an ecosystem of surrounding applications can show Wall Street that the company has multiple revenue streams to support its future business model, with the possibility to boost even further the evaluation of the company.

The development and release of a public API from Airbnb seems to be beneficial for all the parties involved. What would you build with it?

Leave a comment below and if you are also looking forwards to finally seeing Airbnb releasing a public API, share this article and tweet your interest to @Airbnb!