By when do you expect Airbnb India’s business to meet pre-pandemic numbers?
In 2021, we almost met our 2019 numbers. So, we’re almost back to where we left off. Additionally, we saw that domestic stays within India in rural areas in Q3 of 2021 were double that of the same period in 2019. This is a shift we’ve seen in many countries during the pandemic. People have been travelling within their own country, going to places, particularly rural areas they might not have been to before. In the past year, travellers on Airbnb travelled to 6,000 new cities and towns that before no one on Airbnb had ever been to. As international travel reopens, that too will be a big opportunity.
Is Airbnb going to invest more in India?
We will be opening a technology hub in Bengaluru. We are very excited to be part of the Bengaluru tech ecosystem. We hope to hire more than 100 high-tech employees in the near future. We have always wanted to bring our culture of innovation to the Bengaluru ecosystem. I think this is going to be very important as we serve India. We will soon see a tourism rebound in India, and we look forward to partnering with local governments across the country. The centre will help us and our local teams to better localise Airbnb in their markets.
There is a race among various travel and tourism-related platforms to be an end-to-end service provider for travellers. Where do you stand in that journey?
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It’s certainly something that we aspire towards, and we had a lot of different projects going on before the pandemic. Now the pandemic has caused us to think carefully about what’s most important to us. Right now, obviously, the pandemic has hit us hard. We saw our revenue drop 80% in a span of two weeks, and we had to make some trade-offs. We couldn’t do the same things we’ve been doing before. And that’s when we decided to double down on what makes us different, which is the fact that we have hosts. We have ordinary people who are providing exceptional hospitality. Whether it’s sharing their homes, offering experiences, or giving recommendations.
We have 4 million hosts today. But we think we can have many millions more. And so, we think this is still an under-tapped opportunity that we’re focused on pursuing. I think that as we think about the end-to-end platform, we’re going to make sure that we think about approaching it in a way that leverages our differentiation. Everything we do is really host-led. It is our goal to be one of the most creative companies on the planet, and we think of new opportunities in a different way than most.
Do you think that the Ukraine-Russia conflict will set back travel plans in the summer?
I think it’s really early to tell. All of this has played out in the span of a couple of weeks. Two weeks ago, no one would have predicted where we’re at today. So far, this conflict has been in a focused geography, obviously, we’re seeing the impacts of it broadly in terms of fuel prices, refugees, etc.
I think one thing we’ve learned from the pandemic, though, is that there is this appetite to travel, there is this need to connect, and there is this pent-up demand. It remains to be seen how that plays out in travel.
What we’ve learned at Airbnb is that you can adapt, even as consumer behaviour changes quickly. There’s an inherent adaptability to our platform; the fact that we have homes, not just in the cities, but in rural areas. So, we can meet the demand wherever it wants to go, even if it wants to stay domestically. And we’ve tried to lean into what consumers want at the moment.
So, over the last year, we’ve launched more than 150 product features aimed at what consumers want right now. We have something we call flexible search, which allows people to basically search for and find a place to stay without specifying specific dates. And since we’ve launched it, we’ve seen more than 800 million searches happen with our flexible date search tool. We’ve innovated and stayed really agile, picking up on what the consumers wanted during a time of great change. And that will be our strategy going forward, as we expect travel to keep changing. We’re going to be very responsive to it.
During the Ukraine-Russia conflict, many people across the globe booked apartments on Airbnb Ukraine, with no intention of staying but just to help Ukrainians. How did that idea come along?
This is the first time we’ve seen something like this happen. The intent of the people is basically to give money directly to people impacted by the war in Ukraine. Again, these hosts are not soliciting. This is really an upswell of kindness among guests around the world, wanting to help out. In the last 24 hours, there’s been about $1.5 million gifted on the platform —that’s a significant amount of money in a small window of time.
In parallel to that, Airbnb has made a commitment to house 100,000 refugees from Ukraine over the coming months. Basically, airbnb.org and donors to airbnb.org are contributing funds to help pay for this. And also, hosts on the Airbnb platform are opening up their homes, some free of charge, others at a discounted rate, to help house refugees from Ukraine.
That’s a very unique example of innovation through community…
The idea of hosting refugees was born way back in 2012 on Twitter. In 2012, one of our New York hosts offered up her home free of charge to local New Yorkers who might need a place to stay during a hurricane.
We thought to ourselves, maybe there are other New Yorkers who want to do the same thing out of generosity. And sure enough, within 24 hours, over 1,000 people opened up their homes.
Over the years, we’ve improved that functionality. Most recently, we’ve housed more than 20,000 Afghans while they searched for permanent housing. We’ve really built up an incredible capability to do this, and we’re happy to make it available during this terrible tragedy in Ukraine.
What’s the company’s philosophy behind such initiatives?
Well, I’m an engineer, but my two cofounders are designers. But as a result of their background, we bring a lot of design thinking into the company. We’re very philosophical about our purpose and principles. I think even from the early days of the company, we would ask ourselves, what impact do we want to have on the world? It’s a question we continually ask ourselves. We also think a lot about our various stakeholders — our guests, our hosts, our employees, the communities in which we operate, and, of course, our investors. So, in everything we do, we think about how Airbnb is positively impacting these five stakeholders. We are constantly looking for ways to create value and do good. I think we are ambitious optimists and self-aware of what we’re doing in the world.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has decided to live as an Airbnb guest for an undefined period of time. How’s that experiment going? I mean, what are the key learnings?
Joe (Joe Gebbia, cofounder) Brian Chesky and I have always believed in staying close to the user experience. And so, during this time when travel is changing, we believe that people can live, work, and travel all at the same time. Brian wanted to live that experience himself. And out of that comes two things: a lot of tactical observations about bugs in the product and, in a strategic way, what you need when you are living on the platform, not just for a few days or weeks. You are no longer a tourist but a long-term resident of the area.
I think there’s a lot to explore in terms of the experience and understanding the needs of these new age travellers.
The reason we facilitate payments is not the credit business model, but to solve a user experience problem that we first discovered by using the product ourselves. Brian attended a conference in Austin and didn’t have any money on him for a couple of days, and things got a little awkward with the host. So, we thought maybe we should facilitate payments upfront. So, this explains a little bit about our approach: we really tried to live the user experience, and even now, after 14 years and all of our success, we still want to be on the frontlines, getting first-hand feedback and drawing inspiration from our community. Every week, Brian has a story to share.
You’ve been through two black swan events in the last two years What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned as a leader?
First off, communication is really important during a crisis. Communicating with our employees about what’s happening and how we’re going to navigate this situation Also, communicating with all our stakeholders, including our guests, hosts, employees, and, of course, the communities in which we operate and our investors. And for each of these, we thought to ourselves, what can we do for each stakeholder?
