The accommodations booking service ups their cachet as cultural escorts
For those not familiar, accommodations service Airbnb let's you list or book "an apartment for a night, a castle for a week, or a villa for a month" via their online service. The website claims to have spaces for rent in over 26,000 cities around the world. Over the last four years they've grown exponentially, creating a special niche for themselves.

Airbnb is now expanding their domain with Neighborhoods, a web service that allows users to filter through specific areas within a city using tags like "gritty", "hipster", "expensive" and "celebrities". Once you settle on a neighborhood, the site offers a well-curated collection of photos and "local knowledge" from that area, as well as the most popular spots for rent. Right now guides are only offered for seven of the 26,000 cities (Rio, New York, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Paris and Washington) but we're confident that number will grow.

As we mentioned in our Cultural Escorts brief, gone are the days of staying in cookie-cutter hotels and wandering aimlessly around a city. More and more services are ready to connect travelers with local culture and even local people. We profiled three great examples in our recent Future of Travel Forum.