In a first-of-its-kind integration, Squarespace partners with Airbnb to allow Acuity Scheduling users to reach new customers on Airbnb's new marketplace.
Role
Design Lead
Desktop + Mobile Design
Timeline
7 months
Key Results
Opened new revenue stream as Acuity Scheduling receives commission for each booking
Over 4,000 users enabled the integration in the year
In 2025, Airbnb reached out to the Acuity Scheduling team with a partnership opportunity.
In what was described as their biggest release of the summer, Airbnb would integrate with Acuity Scheduling (Squarespace's service selling and appointment booking platform) so that users can offer them on Airbnb's vetted marketplace. Acuity would get commission from those Airbnb bookings as a result.
I led design end to end for this initiative, working closely with the Airbnb product development team and within the constraints of their current services and offerings structure.
To be eligible for the integration, Acuity users must sell services in wellness, beauty, food, and photography. There are other requirements as well—the user can't be an Enterprise customer, must be on a paid Acuity subscription, and is the only admin.
Designs across the user journey: feature discovery, connect to Airbnb, activity creation, and activity management.
This was a highly complex feature to build, with lots of dependencies on Airbnb.
There was a lot of deep technical work to make calendars and availabilities sync across both platforms. Airbnb had very specific requirements related to activity durations, so we had to create validations and enforce certain rules in Acuity. We also had to figure out how to prevent unqualified Acuity users (those not in the accepted verticals) from seeing the integration.
Acuity offerings went live on Airbnb's new marketplace a few months after their app relaunch.
Airbnb created significant marketing buzz and fanfare around this release. Initially, we made it available to a small cohort of users to catch and address bugs, and eventually ramped up to 100%. This was a major milestone for our business; it was the first time we built functionality to expose our services on third-party platforms. After the release, Acuity took these learnings to expand on distribution, looking for other opportunities to apply the same patterns of cross-listing. By the end of 2025, we had more than 4,000 users connect to Airbnb.