Inside Its New Push into Hotels and Hotels’ Reaction
One of Airbnb’s first taglines was “Forget hotels.” And CEO Brian Chesky once thought the company would never list one. He changed his mind because customers kept asking for them, he said at a Goldman Sachs conference this month. “At some point, I stopped being ideological,” Chesky said. “I started becoming practical.”
He now wants hotels to become one of Airbnb’s next “multi-billion-dollar businesses.” But Airbnb isn’t copying Booking.com or Expedia. At least for now, it’s curating supply, taking a lower cut, and betting that its audience, with over 1.6 billion devices accessing it every year, will deliver demand to hotels that they aren’t getting elsewhere.
Airbnb had 3,939 hotels using a new listing format across hundreds of markets as of September 4, according to AirDNA. Hotels are still “a single-digit percentage of nights booked,” Chesky said, referring to the second quarter. But Airbnb’s core business is approaching $100 billion in gross booking valu
