Airbnb’s Brian Chesky is Done With Back to Basics

08.11.2023 - 16:05 / skift.com / Brian Chesky / Sarah Kopit

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky says 2023 marks the end of the company’s focus on perfecting its core business. He’s spent the past two years gathering feedback from hosts and guests to get the basic product right. Now, he says he’s ready to move forward and launch new things. 

The company, founded on the idea that homeowners could make extra cash by renting out a spare room, surged in popularity during the pandemic. 

The aftermath, however, seemingly left everyone complaining. For guests it was the cleaning fees. For hosts, a blow to their profit margins as the world returned to the office. And municipalities – most notably travel and tourism behemoth New York City – started enforcing regulations. 

Skift spoke with Chesky as Airbnb was releasing a new round of product features. In our interview, Chesky addressed the biggest challenges Airbnb faces and what comes next. 

The top takeaways are below, edited for clarity:

The reason I thought [New York City] was a cautionary tale is because a lot of people ask me are other cities going to copy? I said, well, actually, it turns out most cities – at least most big cities, 80% of big cities –  talk to other cities. 

And so London and Paris and Los Angeles and Chicago and we can go down the list –  they’re all different, but they all have found a solution that New York has not found. Where they have, typically, a registration system where they say how many nights a year you can rent. And if it’s a city with limited housing that might be a little more restrictive. 

If it’s a vacation destination, they’ll probably have no restrictions because they live and die by that. Two-thirds of homes on Airbnb in the United States or according to census data are where there’s no hotel. So if the city were to restrict Airbnb, no one’s ever visiting that city. 

And I don’t think you ever want a town or city in the world, that I’m aware of, where you want it flooded only with tourists. But I think the inverse may also be true. 

I don’t think there’s a lot of communities where you never want an outsider. When’s the last time, like, ‘no outsiders allowed’ was that good and healthy for a community? So I think the right balance is to redistribute travel. 

I think overtourism isn’t too many people traveling.  It’s too many people going to the same place, at the same time. 

They should probably go to small towns. I remember I went to Paris and the Minister of Tourism told me, we want people to not go to Paris but to go to other small towns in France and spread out and not overwhelm them. I think the problem is if everyone goes to one town, and I think that certain towns get fashionable, and it’s not even really an Airbnb thing.

I mostly want people to know that we’re going to collaborate