Tech

Airbnb gets into hotels, expands AI for host onboarding and customer support

Published

3 months ago

May 20, 2026

Airbnb’s core business was letting users book a room or a whole property owned by someone else. In most cases, the host would be a house or a property owner, and you would get a stay with basic services such as a bed, a bath, and a kitchen. The company is now introducing hotels to its platform to drive new revenue and offer more options for travelers to book stays.

The company has been testing out hotel listings for a few months and is officially adding a filter to search for them in its app. Initially, the travel tech company is partnering with boutique hotels in 20 cities, including New York, Paris, London, Madrid, Rome, and Singapore.

Image Credits: AirbnbImage Credits:Airbnb

Users will see a pop-up to look at hotels if they are searching for a stay for one or two nights in a city. They can also choose to see only hotels by applying a particular filter in the search. Airbnb said that it is offering a price match guarantee and would refund the difference in app credits if you find the listing at a lower rate somewhere else.

“There are a few examples of the types of trips for which a hotel is probably better suited, such as last-minute bookings, one-night stays, and business trips. What we’ve done in the Airbnb app is that when we can see you’re searching for that kind of stay, we can recommend hotels without sending you to another part of the app or tapping on another tab,” Jud Coplan, VP of marketing at Airbnb, told TechCrunch in a call.

For Airbnb, this is also an opportunity to offer stays to travelers in locations like New York City and Singapore, where short-term stays are barred.

Property booking is just one part of the equation now for Airbnb. The company also wants users to book experiences and services, which were launched last year, during their trip as well. In the last few months, the company has launched grocery delivery to properties and airport pickup services. With its summer launch, Airbnb is adding luggage storage in over 15,000 locations. Plus, it will launch car rental services this summer.

Within experiences, the company is adding visits with local guides for 3,000 landmarks. It is also adding more than 2,500 food experiences in the mix. With these offerings, Airbnb will try to compete better with Viator or GetYourGuide.

Airbnb is redesigning the app to accommodate all the different parts, such as stays, experiences, and services. On the home page, users will see suggestions for all categories. But they can switch to individual tabs and look at a particular offering, too.

While the company is not launching any official loyalty program, it will start offering Airbnb credits for the first car rental booking or up to 15% credit on hotel bookings. Having these credits might nudge people to use the app more, potentially testing the waters for a long-term loyalty program.

But, where is AI?

Several travel companies have added AI-powered itinerary builders or trip planning tools. Airbnb has stayed away from this trend. In its latest earnings call, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said that a chatbot as an interface is not suited for travel.

“I think that the way in which we think about AI is how it can be used to help people find what they’re looking for more effectively and efficiently. And you see with this release that we have AI spread across a number of features across the app on the guest side and the host side,” Coplan said.

The company is using AI in some other tools. With this release, it will let hosts add their address and let AI fill in details for easy listing creation. On the customer side, it is introducing category tags such as location, amenities, and family-friendliness that let you skim through reviews related to the tag.

The company is also adding a tool that compares properties in your wishlist and shows AI-generated summaries to give you information about which property you can pick.

The biggest area Airbnb is applying AI to is customer service. It rolled out the AI bot to the U.S. last year and is now eyeing global expansion with support for 11 languages. Chesky said during the Q1 2026 call that the chatbot handles 40% of its queries. The updated support will also have interactive cards, such as a way to update your trip or solve other issues.

Airbnb said that later this year, it will start using a voice-based AI assistant that users can talk to on a call. It said that it is working with multiple partners for this product, but didn’t specify any names.

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Tech

Planned Amazon data center could become the biggest climate polluter in the U.S.

Published

4 hours ago

August 8, 2026

qasimgillani

As part of a planned data center in Pecos County, Texas, Amazon is investing in an on-site power plant that could become the largest source of climate pollution in the United States, according to The New York Times.

The NYT says the plant would burn natural gas and is permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide per year — more than any other power plant in the U.S.

In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson confirmed that the data center will “be powered by new on-site generation that won’t raise electricity costs for Texas families.” (Data centers face growing political opposition for a number of reasons, including their effect on electricity costs.)

AI has already had a significant impact on Amazon’s carbon emissions, which it reported were up 16% last year — the wrong direction for a company that pledged to eliminate its carbon emissions by 2040. And that could get worse as Amazon and tech companies back the development of huge natural gas plants to support their power-hungry data centers.

The Amazon spokesperson said, “The world looks different now than when we co-founded the climate pledge,” while also claiming, “Our commitment hasn’t changed.”

Tech

OpenAI acquires presentation startup NextSlide

Published

6 hours ago

August 8, 2026

qasimgillani

NextSlide recently announced that it’s joining OpenAI, with the presentation startup’s team members now working on ChatGPT.

The NextSlide website currently displays a note from founder Ahmed Beshry describing the startup’s product as one “that could turn prompts, notes, documents, or research into a polished, editable presentation.”

The ultimate goal, Beshry said, was “to make visual communication more accessible and help more people express their ideas clearly.” So by joining OpenAI, the team will “continue pursuing that same mission: building AI products that help people create, communicate, and turn their ideas into meaningful work.”

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. In a note on LinkedIn, Beshry said the announcement is coming “a few months late,” as the acquisition took place “earlier this year.”

Beshry was previously a co-founder at Caper AI, a smart cart/cashier-less checkout startup acquired by Instacart in 2021.

Tech

X replaces ‘misaligned’ revenue sharing program with Original Content Rewards

Published

9 hours ago

August 8, 2026

qasimgillani

X, the social media platform now owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is shaking up how it pays influencers and creators.

In announcing the change, the company said it will be winding down its existing Revenue Sharing program and replacing it with something called Original Content Rewards. X will stop accepting new Revenue Sharing participants, while existing participants will continue earning money through September 7.

Then, starting on September 8, they’ll be able to apply for the new program. Participants will still need to subscribe to one of X’s Premium tiers, and there will be qualifying thresholds for follower count (500 verified followers) and impressions (500,000 Home Timeline impressions from verified users in 90 days), but it sounds like the big change is the emphasis on originality.

What counts as original content? X said it can include original reporting and analysis, photos and videos created by the poster, or memes and graphics they’ve designed themselves. Commentary also counts, but “if your content regularly incorporates material created by others, you’ll need to contribute meaningful original value for it to qualify under our original content guidelines.”

The company also included examples of posts that won’t count as original, such as those just copied over from another account, downloaded from one account and re-uploaded to your own, or reposting content “without meaningful transformation.”

This announcement follows repeated attempts by X to reform the Revenue Sharing program, for example reducing payments to aggregators and “clickbait” accounts in April. But these efforts have also prompted complaints from popular accounts profiting from the current system; Musk even reversed some of those changes (giving a creator’s local audience more weight when calculating payouts) after a backlash.

In a post about the new changes, X’s Allegra Jacchia wrote that the existing program “had reached a point where its incentives were misaligned.”

“Creators should be focused on bringing net new content to the platform instead of maximizing payouts,” she said. “We could have kept adding more rules and exceptions, but ultimately the better decision was to start fresh and build a program designed from day one to reward originality.”

Jacchia added that X be “continue refining the program, improving our models, and raising the bar over time.”

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