Do Airbnb 'Trips' live up to their promise to put the magic back into travel?

Paul Ash heads to LA to try one of Airbnb's new 'immersive experiences': where tourists can hang out with locals and do local stuff

A is for AIR MATTRESS.That's the inflatable bed from which Airbnb rose up and walked in San Francisco in 2008.

It also stands for ARRIVAL, which we do with a thud a little after midday at LAX, where the queues for immigration stretch almost back to the aircraft we have all just disembarked from.

It occurs to me that I have no idea how to get from the airport to my "listing" but I am directed to a meter cab driven by an ex-Muscovite, who says by way of greeting that he didn't vote because, just like when he lived in Russia, what was the point when the result was always the same?

"Anyway, welcome to Los Angeles," he says. "I am Vladimir."

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In the two hours it takes us to grind our way through LA's famously ludicrous traffic, Vladimir and I have talked about many things. By the time he drops me off in the now gentrified suburb of Echo Park, we could be old friends. But I guess I'll never see him again. (Like many things here, it's complicated.)

The next day, when Airbnb chief executive Brian Chesky tells the rapturous crowd, who have trekked to Airbnb's Open conference in Los Angeles, that one of the hard things about travel is meeting people who actually live there, I reflect that my afternoon of freeflow conversation in the traffic with Vladimir was, admittedly, a rare encounter.

And Airbnb would like to fix that.

"How do you immerse in a local community?" asks Chesky, who along with roommate Joe Gebbia began letting airbeds to travellers in their San Francisco living room in 2007.

Roll on Trips, probably Airbnb's most groundbreaking innovation. "Trips are our handcrafted experiences that allow you to immerse in a local community," he says. There are two offerings: immersions, which are multi-day experiences; and single experiences, which last a day or just a few hours. The offerings are grouped not just by city but by passion - history, cities, nature, sports, wellness, fashion and places.

Trips has launched with 500 experiences in just 12 cities so far - Seoul, London, Detroit, San Francisco, Nairobi, Havana, Cape Town, Miami, Paris, Florence, Tokyo and Los Angeles.

By the end of 2017, Trips will be available in 50 cities, but the plan is to be in every city around the world. Not unreasonable for a company that has gone from one air mattress to 3 million listed homes - and a $30-billion valuation by The Wall Street Journal - in nine years.

"I've been thinking about what it means to travel, the purpose of travel," says Chesky.

He  wants people to have those timeless moments that travel can offer, like those days when you were a kid on holiday with your folks somewhere and there are those perfect moments frozen in time, like Polaroid pictures. Except, there's a problem.

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"For many people, travel is easy but not magical," he says. "If you want to have a magical trip, it ends up being a research project. You search online, download an app - maybe use 20 apps - and pretty soon you can end up spending as much time planning your trip as being on your trip. There should not be a trade-off. We think travel can be magical and easy."

Drawing on lessons from Joseph Campbell's classic work of mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Chesky and his team had a lightbulb moment.

"Homes [are] just one small part of a great journey and that great travel is a lot like the characters' experiences in great movies. We decided to start with the magic."

That longed-for magic, for Chesky, "is in the people. It's all about immersing in local communities".

Instead of many apps, the idea is that you now just need one. Homes and rooms (for rent) as well as the locals willing to offer experiences will be available to travellers as a single experience.

In one sense, it moves Airbnb closer to what traditional travel companies already do - offer tours - but with one crucial edge: the addition of a host, a local with whom you get to spend a time and maybe have a glimpse into their real worlds.

This means exploring Havana's music scene with a local singer, working as a volunteer at a San Francisco animal shelter called Muttville, exploring LA's secret mountain roads with a local biker named Johnny or spending time with the warder who guarded and cooked for Nelson Mandela.

sub_head_start WE TRIED IT: AIRBNB'S 'THE URBAN ECOIST' TRIP IN LA sub_head_end

THE TRIP

The Urban Ecoist is a three-day social impact immersion visiting eco-projects in Venice, California, and meeting locals and eating and working with them.

Proceeds all go to Community Healing Gardens, a non-profit which aims to "transform Los Angeles communities by urban gardens that provide healthy food, education and jobs, and foster community while educating about the urgency of human and planetary health".

THE EXPERIENCE

Spending a day cruising around Venice (that's Venice, CA, the one with stucco houses and fewer canals) with a bunch of urban farmers was certainly far beyond any travel experience I'd ever had.

Nicole - nickname "Girliegreen" - my host for the day is a sustainability expert and eco-trendsetter. Her three-day Urban Ecoist immersion takes you into the streets of Venice to look at the massive public-garden food boxes where, as "Farmer" Ben who runs the project says, "you can get your hands dirty because getting your hands into the soil is proven to be good for your health".

Then it's onto bikes for a slow crank through quiet suburban streets and along the colourful mania of Venice Beach itself - combine Durban's beachfront and Sea Point's Promenade, add tattoo parlours, skateboarders, buskers, homeless anti-Trump protestors, many more dogs, and a sprinkling of weird folks and you get the idea - and a visit to a couple of environmentalists who are doing really good things.

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At a boutique called Late Sunday Afternoon, owned by some cheerful hipsters, we have lunch - all organic and washed down with superb kombucha, because we are in California, after all.

Then we help Matthew, one of the owners, make "knotted and blessed" waterbottle slings from scraps of recycled fabric.

Then it's off to meet environmental architect David Hertz, who has installed in his studio a massive Skywater machine which produces 570 litres of the purest water a day - from air.

"Why would you drink water that might be 20,000 years old by the time it's come up from the aquifer when you could drink this?" he asks.

David and his partner Laura show us the hydroponic towers where they grow lettuces, using that very same water.

We fill our beautiful glass waterbottles - which we are now carrying in the slings we made earlier - from the tap, which is outside so that the anyone passing by can help themselves.

A homeless guy ambles by pushing a trolley, pauses to fish out an army-surplus canteen out of his pack and fills it from the tap, nods a hello to David and walks on.

It's all very Californian, and if I'd been just a normal tourist passing through, I probably wouldn't have seen it.

THE COST

R3,137, which includes lunches, coffee, a glass water bottle and the sling you'll make at Late Sunday Afternoon.

• The Trips are all listed on the Airbnb app, which you can download free from the App Store or Google Play. For more about Trips, see airbnb.com.

• Ash was a guest of Airbnb.