Airbnb's New Strategy to Re-Engage Gen Z

25.08.2023 - 13:40 / skift.com / Brian Chesky

Young people made Airbnb a household name, and CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky doesn’t want his online travel agency to lose its cool factor. Chesky is pushing the online travel agency to evolve faster to give the next wave of emerging travelers what they want most, namely, affordable places to stay and a hip, intuitive booking interface.

All of the company’s changes announced this month and all of its strategy talk stated during an earnings call on Tuesday can be illuminated by Chesky’s focus on creating “a product that the 26-year-old me would’ve wanted.”

In the U.S., for instance, Airbnb’s lowest-price listings have the highest occupancy, Chesky said. But there isn’t enough budget-friendly supply.

“One of the most important things we can do to make Airbnb affordable is to make sure we have enough supply in the platform,” Chesky said.

The company believes that adding supply and highlighting affordable options will help its rates continue to normalize post-pandemic and retain its appeal to Gen Z.

“Hopefully, our rates do not increase as fast as hotels do over the next couple of years,” Chesky said.

As you might have expected, Airbnb saw an acceleration in the growth of its “active listings” on its platform as the pandemic waned. In the first quarter, Airbnb grew its global supply by 18 percent, compared to the same prior year period. That growth reflected a multi-quarter pattern.

But the online agency also wants to highlight affordable options, especially for younger travelers. Earlier this month it introduced a product called Airbnb Rooms — which aims to spotlight stays within people’s homes that have an average price in the U.S. of $67 a night. In comparison, Airbnb’s overall average daily rate was $168 in the first quarter.

The move was “not just to bring people to Airbnb that want affordable options, but [to appeal to] really new travelers that have never really traveled very much before, especially Gen Z,” Chesky explained.

Other priorities for the year — making its platform more host-friendly, fine-tuning its core services, and expanding geographically and product-wise — are all in the service of staying relatable for a new generation.

One thing young people — and people with a youthful mindset — can’t stand is online travel booking and customer service interfaces that have barely changed in a couple of decades.

Even chatbots, much discussed today, aren’t cool enough.

A few months ago, when OpenAI’s launched plug-ins that enabled third parties to build chatbots using its ChatBGT service based on generative AI (artificial intelligence), Airbnb was supposed to be one of the launch partners for the plug-ins.

Right before our launch, Chesky pulled the plug on the text-based interface.

“Ultimately,