Airbnb Messaging
Airbnb Messaging
Every trip on Airbnb begins with a message, over 3 billion of them a year. It is the one surface every user passes through, whatever product line brought them there.
In 2024, as Airbnb moved beyond Homes into Experiences and Services, the old Messaging had to become something new. As one of two design PoC, I rebuilt Messaging from the ground up, from its core framework to the features layered on top, culminating in a flagship launch for the 2024 Airbnb Summer Release.
Due to an active NDA, some project details have been generalized.
The old Messaging was built for a single kind of trip. As the business grew, three forces began asking it to carry far more than it was ever meant to hold.
A host may also be a guest. A booker may also be a co-traveler. An Airbnb user wears many hats, yet the old system could only ever see one. It split hosting and traveling into separate Inboxes, so a host on their own trip had to jump between the two just to keep up with their own conversations.
Messaging already carried Traveling, Hosting, Co-hosting, Superhost, Luxe, and Support. With Experiences and Services on the way, each bringing its own actions, roles, and business requirements, the system was about to hit its ceiling. Every new line meant another bespoke build on a foundation that could not stretch.
Experiences and Services work differently from Homes. Strangers often gather around a single activity, and everything depends on how well they can talk to one another. Messaging had to stop feeling like a support desk for closing a transaction and start feeling like a real conversation: engaging, expressive, and built for groups. The old text-only surface could do none of it.
Rather than build a new Messaging for every business line, we designed one foundation for all of them. Three principles shaped it, each answering one of the three pressures head on.
Every role lives in one Inbox, so a person stays whole no matter how many hats they wear.
One framework that flexes across business lines, identities, and every device Airbnb ships on.
A surface that behaves like a real conversation: expressive, rich, and built for groups.
Two separate products, a navigation that only grew messier, and cards that shared no rules. Every piece had been built on its own, and it showed.
Nearly 35% of Airbnb guests also host, yet their two Inboxes were entirely separate products.
Airbnb kept adding business lines, and the old navigation simply piled them on.
The old filter exposed every dimension at once, with no sense of what mattered most.
The guest Inbox shipped without the basics, no search and no filter to fall back on.
Thread cards spanned different businesses and scenarios, yet followed no shared standard.
One system for every role, every scenario, every business.
We remapped the Inbox around one shared structure, so every role and business could live in the same place instead of each carving out its own.
A progressive filter that grows with a person's complexity rather than Airbnb's. Tabs break down past five items, and search asks people to know what they want before they look. This sits between the two: collapsed for the guest with a single trip, and unfolding only for the host who is juggling many.
A single card structure carries every business Airbnb runs, and it knows which detail matters most in each. One anatomy, tuned to its context, so a Home, an Experience, and a Support case each lead with exactly what a person needs to see.
Inside a thread, a plain message list becomes a surface that adapts to who is talking, expands to whatever needs saying, and carries the actions that move a trip forward.
The same thread renders differently depending on the hat you are wearing, surfacing what each role needs most and leaving the rest out to keep things light. A host sees the guest. A guest sees the trip. One structure resolves by identity, so the context is always right.
One composer built to expand and contract with whatever a person needs to say, from a quick reply to a scheduled payment request.
A slim, lightweight bar that keeps focus on the conversation.
A tap grows the bar into a full text field, with the keyboard and formatting tools ready underneath.
Photos, videos, and other rich media attach from the same input.
Long replies or pasted text push the composer to full screen, trading chrome for room to read and revise.
One tap surfaces the shortcuts people reach for most: quick replies, scheduling, payment requests, and refunds.
A built-in picker for sharing a host's own guidebooks and highly rated experiences, pulled straight into the thread.
React, quote, edit, unsend: the everyday gestures people expect from any modern chat, and the ones a group conversation leans on most. Every bubble now carries the small interactions that make a conversation feel alive.
Photos, videos, and links render inline, so a thread reads like a shared album rather than a pile of attachments. It is what turns coordinating a trip into something that feels social.
A conversation carries all kinds of indicators: someone joined, someone is typing, an action needs a response. We redefined their structure so even a busy group thread never feels crowded by them.
In the new Messaging, the pivotal moments of a trip no longer hide in a separate flow. They happen right in the conversation, as cards. A payment request, a booking change, an itinerary, a refund: each becomes a structured card sent straight into the thread. This was the truest test of designing for scale, one card system against an open-ended set of actions.
A card can do what a line of text cannot. It carries state, whether pending, accepted, or expired, and it carries a next step to take. It holds all of that in one place, legible at a glance and actionable in a tap, without pulling anyone out of the conversation they are already in.
Sent by people, these cards let a host or guest drop an action straight into the thread, from a payment request to a change of dates, without ever leaving the conversation.
Sent by Airbnb, these cards surface the right information at the right moment, from booking updates to reminders, keeping both sides oriented as a trip moves along.
Messaging launched as a flagship of the 2024 Summer Release: many Inboxes collapsed into one, a card system new teams now build on without a designer holding their hand, and a chat that finally feels like a chat. The clearest measure of the work is what the next business line will need. Not a new messenger, just a new card.
Airbnb Messaging is always iterating, and different parts of this work ship on different roadmaps, so what you see in the app may not match these screens exactly.
I co-led the end-to-end design of the Messaging rebuild, from the core framework through the features built on top of it. I was the design point of contact for Thread, and I contributed to every part shown above.