Academic project
2023
Airbnb: Understanding how young adults plan and book travel
Exploring travel behaviors to uncover opportunities for a better booking experience.
Overview
Understanding the barriers between browsing and booking
This course-based UX research project examined the travel booking habits and decision-making processes of young adults to help convert Airbnb website visitors under 35 into paying customers.
Using a mixed-methods approach, our team identified usability barriers and decision-making factors that affect booking behavior on Airbnb’s desktop site, yielding in actionable recommendations aimed at increasing engagement for young adult users.
Context
A new generation is reshaping how travel is planned and booked
Young adults are reshaping the travel landscape—not only through how often they travel, but also through how they plan. Their booking journeys span multiple digital touchpoints as they browse, compare, and evaluate options before buying.
For Airbnb, understanding these behaviors presents an opportunity to identify what drives young adults from browsing to booking.
Problem
Browsing doesn’t always lead to booking
For this course-based project, our team explored the browsing-to-booking journey for young adults using Airbnb’s desktop platform.
While many young adults visit travel websites to explore lodging options, they book far less often than they browse. Young travelers browsing Airbnb struggle to confidently choose a listing due to overwhelming options and unclear differences between stays, leading to decision fatigue and delayed or abandoned bookings.
Our research centered on one question:
The Challenge
Methodology
Building insights through a layered research approach
Our team conducted recruitment screeners, contextual inquiries, interviews, usability testing, surveys, affinity mapping, and data analysis—in that order—to generate actionable insights.
By sequencing our methods this way, we were able to intentionally build findings on top of one another, allowing each phase to inform and strengthen the next.
Recruitment Screener
Finding the right participants
We selected participants under 35 years old who either traveled recently or planned to travel within the next three months to ensure that our key findings were derived from our targeted demographic.
Who we recruited
Contextual Inquiry
Understanding how young adults actually plan and book travel
To understand how young adults approach travel planning and accommodation decisions, our team conducted contextual inquiries using an interview guide I created.
We explored participants’ experiences and priorities through semi-structured interviews, then observed how they searched for accommodations—asking probing questions to uncover the workflows, behaviors, and decisions shaping their process.
What we learned
01 — AFFORDABILITY
“I have a limited budget and I’d rather spend it on random things than an expensive hotel.”
02 — CONTEXT
“It just depends on the situation.”
03 — TRANSPORTATION
“I would pull up Google Maps in another window to check walking routes.”
04 — SAFETY
“Safety means different things for people.”
From there, we wanted to build on what we learned by evaluating the usability of Airbnb’s website.
Usability Testing
Evaluating how Airbnb supports the lodging journey
Building on our contextual inquiry findings, we evaluated how well Airbnb supported participants as they searched for lodging and explored other features.
Survey
Understanding the broader travel landscape
To complement our qualitative research, we used a survey to capture broader patterns in how people plan travel and the platforms they use.
While contextual inquiries and usability tests provided in-depth insights into pain points and user behaviors, the quantitative data allowed us to complement these insights with measurable evidence.
Synthesis
Turning observations into patterns
We synthesized findings across our contextual inquiries, usability tests, and survey, grouping recurring observations into three themes: user considerations, preferences & behaviors, and usability insights.
Key Findings & Recommendations
From research insights to design opportunities
Impact
Seeing our recommendation reflected in Airbnb
In 2023, our research identified the discoverability of Airbnb Experiences as a usability gap and recommended giving the feature greater prominence. Airbnb later introduced a similar navigation change, moving Experiences into its primary navigation. While our work was not connected to Airbnb's product team, the change reinforced the relevance of the usability issue we identified.
Learnings
