Airbnb
Designing a new feature to allow group reservations for Airbnb
Introduction
Coordinating a weekend getaway shouldn’t feel like herding cats. Yet Airbnb’s individual-centric flow left users juggling links, approvals, and the entire bill for a group. In this project, I worked with Airbnb to re-imagine group reservations feature. The brief was blunt: integrate group-friendly tooling, especially cost-sharing, without breaking the familiar experience. How might Airbnb let friends plan, pay, and stay together through one frictionless flow?
Client:
Airbnb
My Role:
Product Designer
Service Provided:
Product Design, App Design
Process
To map the chaos of group trips, we surveyed and interviewed 17 frequent Airbnb users and reconstructed their end-to-end journey.
Affinity mapping surfaced three pain clusters:
Late reimbursements create financial and social friction.
Switching among Venmo, Zelle, and Splitwise shreds focus.
The self-appointed planner becomes an unpaid support desk.
White-board sprints explored in-app group chat, shared wish-lists, and host forums, but scoring revealed their marginal value. Payment chaos was loudest, so we scoped the MVP to a split-bill flow. This focus promised faster release, lower build cost, and no requirement for every traveller to hold an Airbnb account. Clear guardrails guided design. Early prototypes were sketched, tested in Figma, iterated over two design critiques, and benchmarked for engineering effort.
Result
The resulting flow keeps Airbnb familiar yet lifts the heaviest burden—money.
Email capture for each paying adult during checkout.
Automatic or custom splits, chosen in seconds.
Booker pays only their share; secure pay links reach others.
A live status tracker shows who’s settled and who hasn’t.
Results:
The average collection window fell from three weeks to average of 10 mins. Nine of ten participants said they would use the feature on their next trip; several asked, “Why isn’t this live already?” Airbnb’s design group shortlisted the project for platform rollout. It positions Airbnb as the easiest way to travel together.
