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Spring 2020 felt like a “near-death business experience,” says Airbnb cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky, as bookings dropped 80% within a few weeks. It was also an opportunity to trim back the company’s distracting side projects—tours, hotels, even an airline—and, he says, “focus on the core”: the design and experience of Airbnb’s home-rentals platform. “If not for the pandemic and the crisis, I don’t know how I would have made that pivot,” Chesky says. “But I had to basically rebuild the company a bit from the ground up.”
Last spring, that work led to the biggest change to Airbnb in a decade: a top-to-bottom redesign that lets people search accommodation by category, rather than just destination, which has the benefit of introducing travelers to places and properties they might have otherwise overlooked. The company then turned its attention to how it orients new hosts. As Chesky says, while traveling with Airbnb is now commonplace, “hosting is still a little underground.”
To ease prospective hosts onto the platform, Airbnb created its version of a Genius Bar last fall, allowing people to contact specialized support or match up with an experienced Superhost who can advise them on how to best list their properties. (The Superhost gets a reward for the initial booking.) In 2022, Airbnb added 900,000 active listings. But Chesky sees 2023 as “the year that we can start to make hosting mainstream,” especially as a softening economy drives more people to look for additional income. “We’re back to the economic conditions of when we founded the company,” he says, citing Airbnb’s early days amid the last recession.
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