Airbnb’s Chesky Talks Icons, Loyalty, and His Billion-Dollar Payday
01.05.2024 - 21:47
/ skift.com
/ Brian Chesky
/ Sarah Kopit
Airbnb’s Brian Chesky has entered his next innovation era. He sat down with Skift this week at a product event in Los Angeles for a wide ranging interview on AI, loyalty programs, Airbnb for corporate travelers and his billion-dollar pay package. We also talked about the company’s launch of almost a dozen immersive, experience-based homes that they’re calling ‘Icons.’
The Icons build off the overwhelming success of the Barbie house last year – which Chesky notes got hundreds of millions of impressions on social media and over twice as much attention as the company’s blockbuster IPO.
These houses won’t be a classic revenue generator for Airbnb. They’ll either be free or low cost to guests – and are meant to act as an alternative to advertising.
More importantly, Chesky calls them a “gateway” into the experiences category, something Airbnb has been trying to break into for some time. He stressed Icons isn’t a traditional business, but “more like a really cool thing we’re doing, but it’s a stepping stone to where we’re taking Airbnb.”
Chesky also opened up about overpromising to Skift last year on the timing of Airbnb’s AI revolution. The possibility of a paid Airbnb loyalty program with an Amazon Prime-like membership structure. The tension between Guest Favorites vs. Super Hosts. And what he is doing with his potential multi-billion dollar pay package.
A partial transcript of the interview is below. It has been edited for clarity.
Kopit: You said last May that in a year’s time we would see a whole new Airbnb – and AI would be at the center of it. ‘Icons’ obviously isn’t AI driven. It’s almost completely the opposite. It’s very front-of-house. So have you changed your thinking there?
Chesky: No, no. We’re going pretty deep on AI. I think we made a really important acquisition with GamePlanner. We have the founder of [Apple’s] Siri on the team. We’re bringing on board great talent.
The basic idea is, eventually, we think the app is going to feel more and more like a concierge, that’s going to get to know you, learn about you. We’re starting with customer service. I think that’s the best place to start. So we’re working on AI-powered customer service that will augment the agents or take some tickets off their hands. So it’s going well but yeah, we’re not ready for a new app.
[Chesky starts looking through his phone] Is there a single app in the world that has been transformed by AI, like, generatively? No, there’s not. There hasn’t been one yet.
So it’s all taken a while. I mean, basically, the way I think about it is you have the models and a lot of vision models, but the application layer, like let’s just take our phone: Go through the apps and point to the ones that are totally affected by