Airbnb has launched a new feature called "Trips" which enables travelers to book local activities in the places they visit. The flagship piece of Trips is called "experiences." It matches travelers with locals who offer guided activities in the area.

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This feature has been released for the iOS and Android. It is currently available only in 12 cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Detroit, Havana, London, Paris, Florence, Nairobi, Cape Town, Tokyo, and Seoul. However, Airbnb plans to expand to 50 more cities very soon. It currently lists about 500 experiences divided between multi-day excursions and hours-long experiences. A traveler in France, for instance, can book an experience with a studio artist or a traveler in Alaska could spend days with a veteran mountaineer.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky announced at the company's recent annual Airbnb Open conference that the goal is to provide travelers with the possibility of experiences they would not be able to have as tourists. "These aren't tours: you immerse, you join the local communities," he said.

The company is launching a redesigned version of its app with this feature and many others. The app also includes a Places feature that recommends places to go and things to do based on lists curated by local hosts. Such recommendations are called "insider guides." They are hard to come across in most guidebooks or other such resources.

Airbnb also intends to make restaurant reservations possible though its app via a partnership with Resy. It is also partnering with Detour to bring app-enabled audio guides so that travelers can go on audio walks. Features such as car rentals, grocery delivery, and flight-planning will make Airbnb more of a "platform" than a single service, according to Chesky.

With such features, Airbnb is building on its previous efforts to portray its hosts as travel experts who can wear multiple hats rather than being just temporary landlords. This way the hosts can earn a lot more, and travelers can fulfill their goal of not only traveling but getting to know places deeper as well.