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Airbnb’s new Travel Stories feature lets people show off videos from their trip

Airbnb’s new Travel Stories feature lets people show off videos from their trip

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The increasingly popular “stories” format has infiltrated yet another app: Airbnb. The company quietly launched a new feature called Travel Stories that allows guests to create and upload video sequences in order to show off highlights from their trip, as spotted by TechCrunch,

In an FAQ, Airbnb gives several tips on how to make effective video stories, including holding your phone steady (“try not to pan, but pan slowly if you must”); focus on capturing what you find most interesting about where you are; shoot vertically, not horizontally; and aim to have 10 videos that are 10 seconds long.

Airbnb  Travel Stories
Image: Airbnb

Once you’ve captured all the videos for your story, you can put it all together with the Travel Stories tool within the Airbnb app. Tap on “Add video” to access your camera roll, and select which videos you’d like to include. You can then tag locations, and add a caption that’s one to two sentences explaining what you found interesting in the video, and give location tips to future travelers. To finish it off, preview your work and give it a descriptive title that ideally includes the name of where you went and the type of trip it was (solo, family, work, etc.). Stories are published within the Airbnb app, which makes it a bit harder to share them outside of the network for potential travelers and trip planners when compared to forums like Lonely Planet or TripAdvisor.

The new feature fits within Airbnb’s recent scope of expanding to become a more socially driven travel agency of sorts, instead of just a place to book a home to sleep in for a night. It announced Airbnb Trips in 2016, an initiative to accompany people’s travels with experiences. It now lets you book restaurant reservations, and it has indicated that it will be adding flights in the future.

The new tool can be accessed in the profile view under “Travel Stories,” and it’s currently available for iPhone with the latest version of the Airbnb app. No word yet on when it will arrive on Android.