Not Everything Needs to Be an Experience

We would like to spend an afternoon somewhere without being transformed by it. We would like to arrive, look around, perhaps purchase a biscuit, and return home with substantially the same personality. This increasingly feels like a failure to engage with the offering.

Consider one concrete example of the language surrounding leisure. Airbnb’s May 2025 product announcement introduced services alongside a reimagined Experiences offering. Its release grouped activities including cultural tours, cooking classes, and art workshops into a bookable platform. It also described an app that could suggest services and experiences around a stay.

Those are facts about an announced product, not evidence that everyone now vacations incorrectly. A good guide can reveal things a visitor would otherwise miss. A skilled teacher should be paid. Booking assistance can make an unfamiliar place easier to navigate. We have no principled objection to a cooking class, although we reserve the right to be dreadful at it.

Our objection concerns the expectation that the unstructured parts of life should aspire to the condition of a product listing: legible in advance, distinguishable from competing options, and capable of promising a result.

An afternoon rarely knows its result in advance. You take the wrong street. You discover that the interesting building is closed. You sit on a bench that has not been selected for you by someone with exceptional local knowledge. These can be dull moments. They can also be the moments when a place stops behaving like a demonstration arranged for your benefit.

Calling everything an experience subtly raises the burden of proof. A walk becomes something that ought to deliver perspective. A meal ought to create connection. Rest ought to leave you restored, ideally in a way you can identify before the cancellation window closes. Ordinary satisfaction begins to look like an underperforming version of transcendence.

This is an editorial judgment about language and expectation, not a scientific finding about what a booking app does to the brain. We cannot establish that a label ruins an afternoon. We can notice that the label invites us to evaluate the afternoon before we have finished having it.

The sensible alternative is not compulsory spontaneity. Unplanned travel can be tiring, inaccessible, or simply unpleasant. Some people need a clear itinerary; others enjoy making one. There is no superior form of leisure available exclusively to people who can afford to get lost.

What we defend is room for the unremarkable within whatever arrangements make a day possible. Take the tour and leave the next hour empty. Book the table and decline to turn the meal into a referendum on your taste. Choose a familiar place because you like it, without describing that choice as a return to authenticity.

Businesses can help by stating plainly what they provide. A two-hour workshop is useful information. A promise of profound connection is a considerably larger claim. The distinction respects both the person doing the work and the person deciding whether to pay for it.

We propose a modest standard: let activities be specific and outcomes remain open. Teach the class. Serve the lunch. Show us the building. We will take responsibility for whether any of it becomes a cherished memory.

And if the afternoon amounts to a biscuit and a reasonably comfortable bench, let the record show that nothing has gone wrong.

Source note

Airbnb, 2025 Summer Release, May 13, 2025. Reviewed November 5, 2026. The source supports the product announcement described above.