Brian Chesky took the stage in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday to tell a story about the future.
That story went something like this: 17 years ago, when Chesky cofounded Airbnb, people were skeptical. Who would ever stay in a stranger’s home, they snarled. (In 2008, seven investors rejected the company, turning down what would have been a 10% stake for $150,000.) But the startup defied the odds—it’s now a verb, noun, and a publicly-traded Coins2Day 500 company with an $84 billion market cap.
Now, Chesky explained, it was time for the company to once again blaze a new trail by redefining what it means to “Airbnb” something.
With the just-unveiled Airbnb Services and a relaunched Airbnb Experiences, Chesky painted a picture of a world where you rely on Airbnb as your hub for a singular vacation experience. Chesky talked about Airbnb as a marketplace for unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime moments. Think: making pasta with a chef in Rome, dancing with a K-pop star in Seoul, exploring Notre Dame with a restoration architect, wrestling with a luchador in Mexico City, or even spending a Sunday with Patrick Mahomes.
Chesky closed with a new tagline: “Now you can Airbnb more than an Airbnb.” The idea is that you’d “Airbnb” a massage on vacation—and would eventually start “Airbnb-ing” massages, makeup artists, and hair stylists not just on vacation, but when you’re at home. In short, it was the launch of a superapp that was both a mild repudiation of tech—”somewhere along the way, something drifted, and we started spending more time looking at screens and less time in the real world,” Chesky told the audience—and an incredibly Silicon Valley display.
This presentation, in which Chesky put his best “founder mode” persona on display, was met with both fanfare and criticism. Zynga founder Mark Pincus hailed Chesky’s performance as “Steve Jobs-esque.” Others were skeptical that Airbnb users will turn to the app in their daily, non-vacation lives, and questioned the marketplace pricing Airbnb is using.
The truth, almost definitely, lies somewhere in between.
There are certain ways in which the idea makes good sense. For example, if one of the criticisms of staying in an Airbnb is that you lose the amenities of a hotel, it tracks that the company would want to fix that. Travel is a spectacularly fragmented industry and Airbnb isn’t alone in seeing the level of white space open to consolidation—McKinsey has estimated that the global market for travel experiences is an opportunity that’s worth north of $1 trillion, but which is scattered among a few online platforms and “countless smaller operators.”
At the same time, Airbnb’s ambition of becoming a destination for experiences isn’t new; the Airbnb Experiences product is, after all, a relaunch.
Airbnb Finance Chief Ellie Mertz described the company’s earlier effort as a victim of circumstance. “We launched Experiences many years ago,” Mertz said in an interview. “We started to scale it. The pandemic hit, we put it on the back burner, and haven’t really done anything with it until this point.”
With the benefit of a “multi-year pause,” Airbnb reimagined Experiences, Mertz said, bringing more flexible pricing, stronger vetting to ensure top quality offerings, and a redesigned app that makes it easier for travelers to find and book experiences that fit their trip.
“The current year is about launching,” she said. “We want to get these products and services into our consumers’ hands… Our ambition is to drive these businesses such that they are on a standalone basis material contributors to our top line. What Brian and I have said in the past is the ambition is that we could build these businesses into billion dollar revenue streams over an order of magnitude, in a three-to-five-year period.”
For a company that generated $11.1 billion in revenue last year, an additional billion dollars on the top line could be meaningful. But ringing up that revenue will take a lot of work, and money, as Airbnb essentially tries to create new consumer habits.
To help make the case for Airbnb Experiences, the company is launching Airbnb Originals—a set of premium experiences, underpinned by starpower. For example: Megan Thee Stallion was in the room as Chesky touted the Airbnb Original that the company curated with her—a day with the star rapper in a specially-built anime house. The goal for experiences like this is that they are days you remember for the rest of your life.
At the end of the day, I was taken on one such surprise experience—a listening party with Chance the Rapper in LA, where the beloved indie rapper previewed about ten new songs to a room full of influencers and, well, me. We sat in a room filled with bean bag chairs, green-glowing headphones, and screens filled with lyrics. It was an hour and a half block where the world stopped.
It was intimate, surprising, and the kind of marshalling of starpower that felt pretty authentic—Chance the Rapper, whose last studio album came out in 2019, stood at the front of the room when the demo was finished, answering questions about his music that only so many people have heard. Airbnb did not share details about the financial terms involved in partnering with these celebrities, though it seems safe to guess that whatever it is (revenue share, a fee, or some other arrangement), it’s not cheap.
And that gets to the tricky part of what Airbnb is trying to do, as it bolts a fancy new addition onto a sharing economy, scale business. I don’t think it’s impossible that Airbnb’s push into these new verticals works—maybe I’d want to book a makeup artist through Airbnb as a consumer—but I don’t know if you can curate at scale a marketplace of singular, intimate experiences. They are often by definition limited and magic is hard to screen for quality on a global level.
The idea is somewhat paradoxical and may very well not work as critics think. At the same time, you have to wonder—it may also be about as cock-eyed an idea as staying in other people’s homes on vacation.