Airbnb CEO to ‘live on’ Airbnb, move every couple weeks
Airbnb’s new system aims to identify “potentially high-risk reservations and prevent those users from taking advantage of our platform,” the company said. (Photo Illustration by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images)
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(NewsNation Now) — To help improve Airbnb’s experience for people, the company’s CEO announced Tuesday that he will be “living on” Airbnb.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said on Twitter that he plans on staying in a different town or city every couple of weeks. This week, Chesky said, he’ll be in Atlanta, but will be coming to San Francisco often.
“For now, my home will be an Airbnb somewhere,” Chesky said in a Twitter post garnering thousands of likes.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created the biggest changes to travel since the invention of commercial flying, Chesky said. Remote work has made it so people don’t necessarily need to be in an office every day, he pointed out, and millions of people can now “live anywhere,” which is something reflected in Airbnb’s data.
From July to September, according to Airbnb, one in five stays booked on the platform were for bookings of a month or longer. Nearly half the nights booked were for stays of a week or longer, Chesky said.
Over the past year, 100,000 guests booked stays on Airbnb for at least three months.
“In 2022, I think the biggest trend in travel will be people spreading out to thousands of towns and cities, staying for weeks, months, or even entire seasons at a time,” Chesky said on Twitter. “More people will start living abroad, others will travel for the entire summer, and some will even give up their leases and become digital nomads.”
According to Airbnb’s website, the percentage of people who used their stays to lead a “nomadic lifestyle” grew from 9% to 12% from 2020 to 2021.
Chesky called this trend a “decentralization of living” that’s changing the identity of travel.
“Brian living on Airbnb will help us improve the design of the experience for people who can now live anywhere,” the company said on its website.
“That’s why I’m living on Airbnb,” Chesky said.
During the pandemic, 100,000 towns and cities around the world have had an Airbnb booking during COVID-19, with 6,000 places having their first-ever booking. Overall, since Airbnb was founded in 2007, 4 million hosts in 220 countries and regions have had more than 1 billion guests stay with them.
