Airbnb Trips review: Are the local guides and tours better than a Lonely Planet guide book:

Late last year, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky unveiled the newest iteration of his ubiquitous home-sharing service: Airbnb Trips. During an Apple-style product launch in Los Angeles, Chesky – dressed like a Millennial Steve Jobs in a black Henley T-shirt – announced that Airbnb was evolving from an accommodation site into a complete travel resource. Users will eventually be able to book everything from flights to restaurants, get recommendations and meet locals, all on one platform. Following the announcement I had the opportunity to road test the first of the new services: Experiences and Places.

I'll start with Places, a collection of mini guidebooks written by local "insiders" selected by Airbnb. Examples include a list of laptop-friendly cafes in San Francisco, curated by a mustachioed creative strategist, and a Cuban actress' favourite bohemian hangouts in Havana. Airbnb should have no problem populating this section quickly – there are currently 470 guides covering 12 cities – but at launch the content had yet to reach a useful critical mass.

Case in point: while in Los Angeles I decided to spend a few hours shopping. I opened the Airbnb app and looked in Places for recommendations. I found eight LA shopping guides, a promising start. After I filtered out things such as vinyl stores and barbershops, I was left with three guides that included at least some women's apparel. Only one of them had suggestions in my vicinity: a pair of op shops half an hour away. (One of them turned out to be worth the trek, but a Google search would have found the same results a lot faster.) My initial verdict on Places? It's a good source of inspiration and makes for interesting reading, especially when it comes to niche topics such as Seoul's best running routes or urban farms in Detroit. But don't throw out the Lonely Planet just yet.

I had better luck with Experiences, which Airbnb describes as "handcrafted activities designed and led by local experts". You can tell they've put in a lot of effort with these. Trips launched with 500 experiences in a dozen cities and Airbnb produced a slick promo video for each one. Some experiences are single-day activities, others are multi-day "immersions". But none of them are what you'd call a typical tour, Airbnb insists; they're authentic and insider-y, and they're run by passionate residents just like you. (Sydneysiders began hosting experiences in March as Trips expanded to 20 cities worldwide.)

If Airbnb's philosophy is "live like a local", the experience I was invited to try could be summed up as "eat like a local". On a sunny afternoon, I met with about 10 other journalists and our host Andrew – a born-and-bred Angeleno and the owner of a travel company that runs tours to Spain, Mexico and Cuba. Over the next few hours, his mission was to guide us through a "global tasting trip" of LA's many culinary cultures, an excerpt from his $325 three-day experience, which includes cocktails and dinner.

We began at Olvera Street, a Mexican marketplace located downtown. Outside a colourful stand called Cielito Lindo, we stood on the pavement and ate beef taquitos (a filled taco tube that's fried until crispy) in avocado sauce. Cielito Lindo's signage proclaims that they've been serving taquitos since 1934, but Andrew added some personal history: as a boy, his family would come here before going to baseball games at the nearby Dodgers stadium.

Next stop: a Chinatown mini mall called Far East Plaza. Our destination was Chego, a grab-and-go counter specialising in Korean fusion rice bowls. Andrew gave us some background on chef/owner Roy Choi, one of the originators of the gourmet food truck movement. "What's that line for?" someone asked, pointing to the crowd clogging up the walkway in front of a neighbouring restaurant. "It's a fried chicken place," Andrew answered. "I haven't tried it yet because the line's always too long." He handed out beers, soft drinks and rice bowls topped with intensely umami garlic-and-chili beef slices, fresh Thai basil, and crispy fried shallots.

The food was delicious, but here's what our local insider failed to mention. Roy Choi is passionate about bringing affordable, nutritious food to underserved communities. That's one of the reasons he opened Chego in what was at the time a nondescript Chinatown shopping plaza. Since Choi took up residence in 2013, Far East Plaza has become a booming hipster destination. Other Asian-American cool kids such as Eddie Huang (Baohaus) and Alvin Cailan (Eggslut) opened their own shops, bringing Instagramming Millennials and social media buzz with them. They're revitalising Chinatown in a way that isn't happening in San Francisco or New York, where trendy Asian-American chefs generally do not operate in traditionally Asian areas. What's happening in Far East Plaza is culturally and culinarily exciting, and it's unique to LA. Kudos to our guide for taking us there, but failing to provide more insight and context was a regrettable missed opportunity.